where _α_ 1 _< α_ 2 are the unknown cutoff points. The estimation of the parameters _α_ and _β_ is performed using maximum likelihood (Wooldridge, 2010).

# **4 Data**

We use data from Comoros - Enquˆete int ́egrale aupr`es des m ́enages (EIM 2004), Ghana - Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS 2012/13), Guinea - Enquˆete Int ́egr ́ee de Base pour l’Evaluation de la Pauvret ́e (EIBEP 2002/03), Madagascar - Enquˆete permanente aupr`es des m ́enages (EPM-2005), Malawi - Malawi Integrated Household Survey (IHS3 2010/11), Nigeria - Nigeria General Household Survey (GHS 2010/2011), Rwanda - Integrated Household Living Conditions Survey (EICV 1999/2000), Tanzania - Tanzania National Panel Survey (NPS 2009/2010), and Uganda - Uganda National Household Survey (UNHS 2005/06). The description of the sample composition in each country is presented in table 1. All the surveys are the latest representative datasets available that collect information on both children and their parent’s education regardless of whether parents are alive or, if alive, live in the same household. All the surveys have been conducted from 2000 onwards, and most have been conducted after 2005. The analysis is restricted to those individuals ages between 20 and 69, which corresponds to the year of birth going back as far as 1935 for Comoros, 1944 for Ghana, 1933 for Guinea, 1936 for Madagascar, 1942 for Malawi and Nigeria, 1931 for Rwanda, 1941 for Tanzania, and 1937 for Uganda.<sup>6</sup> After data cleaning, the total sample size ranges from 32,730 in Ghana to 6,778 in Tanzania; a total of more than 145,000 adult children (ages between 20-69) are represented in the study. The data in all the countries are organized into five-year birth cohorts based on the children’s years of birth. In table 1, we also present the minimum sample size in each country, which corresponds to the smallest sample size of five-year birth cohort in each country.

In all the countries, years of schooling is coded as the number of years associated with the highest grade completed, and repeated grades are not counted. Parental educational attainment is the average of the years of schooling of the mothers and fathers. All the surveys contain information on the educational attainment of parents in two separate variables that differentiate the education of parents who are coresiding or not residing in the household. We used the personal identification numbers of fathers and mothers to create a pair of parents and children if the parents and children are still living together in a household. Using this information to create pairs of parents and children imposes a co-residence condition that reduces the sample size significantly. In addition to this information, all the surveys have another question that collects information on retrospective parental educational attainment among household members who are not co-residing in the household regardless of whether the parent is alive.

Combining these two variables, we have been able to identify parental schooling for more than 95 percent of adult respondents in each country. Because of the lack of long panel or administrative data, most studies in the literature have used cross-sectional data and co-residence to identify child-parent pairs, mostly father-son pairs (see, for example, Emran and Shilpi, 2015; Hnatkovska et al., 2013; Jalan and Murgai, 2007). Using co-residence identification has three important implications for the analysis. First, because the distribution of education across both generations is different in the subsample of adults who live together with their parents and versus the total population, sample selection problems arise that bias the intergenerational elasticity downward. For instance, Francesconi and Nicoletti (2006) and Azam and Bhatt (2015) document a bias because of the co-residence condition that ranges from 12% to 39% and 17% in constructing father-son pairs in the United Kingdom and India, respectively. Second, the co-residency criteria over identify younger adult children who are still living with their parents; this might not lead to a representative adult population sample (Jalan and Murgai, 2007; Hnatkovska et al., 2013). Third, children-parent pairs that are constructed using co-residence identification does not allow cohort-wise long-term trend analysis of intergenerational persistence.

> 6The age range is consistent with Hertz et al. (2007), which makes our estimates directly comparable with their estimates of 41 countries. As a result, we are able to rank the countries in our sample against their estimates.

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