country. Second, by closely following the methodology of the two closest antecedent studies in developing countries (Hertz et al., 2007; Azam and Bhatt, 2015), we are able to rank countries in terms of intergenerational educational mobility. To the best of our knowledge, there exist no comparable estimates on these countries.<sup>2</sup> Third, unlike other studies in developing countries, the estimates presented in this study do not suffer from selection bias caused by imposing co-residence to construct parent and child pairs. Most of the studies on intergenerational mobility still rely on cohabitation to identify parent and child pairs. Using this method has two major consequences. First, using coresidents to identify parent and child pairs leads to a sample selection that biases the intergenerational elasticity downward. For instance, Francesconi and Nicoletti (2006) and Azam and Bhatt (2015) document a substantial bias in constructing father and son pairs in the United Kingdom and India, respectively. Second, coresidence over represents younger adults who are still living with parents, which restricts the analysis to an unrepresentative young population (Jalan and Murgai, 2007; Hnatkovska et al., 2013). The current study addresses this issue by using nationally representative data on educational attainment among adult individuals and their parents regardless of whether parents are alive or, if alive, reside in the same household.<sup>3</sup> Fourth, the existing evidence on the link between child and parental education by gender is largely unexplored. A handful of studies examine the intergenerational persistence of economic status between parents and daughters (see Grusky and DiPrete, 1990; Chadwick and Solon, 2002). In this study, we attempt to fill this gap in the literature and provide gender estimates (daughters-mothers, sons-mothers, daughters-fathers, and sons-fathers) of intergenerational educational persistence by five-year birth cohorts in each country.

The study uses two measures of intergenerational educational mobility: intergenerational elasticity and the partial correlation coefficient. The analysis shows the trends in intergenerational educational mobility across five-year birth cohorts for each sex in each country. There are several findings. Comparing the highest educational attainment, both measures accord in pointing out the importance of parental education in determining the educational attainment of children in all the countries. We find a declining cohort trend in the estimated intergenerational elasticity in all the countries, particularly after the 1960s. This implies greater educational mobility among more recent birth cohorts in all the countries. The declining trend after the 1960s coincides with the drastic changes in educational systems and the huge investment in human capital accumulation in the region since independence. We note a country difference: Nigeria, Guinea, Ghana, and Uganda experienced the highest intergenerational mobility, and the Comoros and Madagascar the lowest. The decline in intergenerational education persistence is strongest in the lower tail of the education distribution, and, daughters’ educational attainment is more correlated with parental education. The greater intergenerational persistence among women compared with men is consistent with previous findings in other developing countries (Thomas, 1996; Branson et al., 2012; Ranasinghe, 2015; Emran and Shilpi, 2015). Furthermore, in all the countries except the Comoros, intergenerational persistence from mothers to children is stronger. This result contrasts with evidence from South Africa where the link between children and father’s education is stronger than or the same as that of mothers (Lam, 1999; Girdwood and Leibbrandt, 2009). In line with the findings of Hertz et al. (2007) for 42 countries and Azam and Bhatt (2015) for India, we also show that the correlation coefficient between parents and child’s schooling has been increasing or remaining constant across cohorts, mainly driven by educational inequality in the parents’ generation. This result is not surprising in our context given that the correlation coefficient provides an absolute measure of intergenerational persistence after account is taken of a possible improvement in the distribution of education attainment because of education system reforms, such as the abolition of school fees, which increase average schooling and reduce variation in schooling. The education systems of all the countries in our sample have changed drastically since the 1960s. From a policy perspective, our result highlights the demand for targeted redistributive policies that can improve intergenerational mobility in the region. Moreover, putting in place a favorable environment for women who are less well off in terms of education might play a decisive role in promoting social mobility not only in the short run, but also in the next generation.

The rest of the paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 reviews the literature and places the study in the context of existing literature. Section 3 presents the analytical framework. Section 4 describes the data. Section 5 presents the results. Section 6 offers concluding remarks and describes potential policy implications.

> 2The data used in this study are comparable with the data set used by Hertz et al. (2007) for 42 countries and Azam and Bhatt (2015) for India. Moreover, the sample of Hertz et al. (2007) uses an old survey of Ghana.

> 3See section 4 on the construction of matched data on parents’ and children’s educational educational attainment.

3