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This paper presents credible and comparable evidence on intergenerational educational mobility in 53 developing countries using sibling correlation as a measure, and data from 230 waves of Demographic and Health Surveys. It is the first paper to provide estimates of sibling correlation in schooling for a large number of developing countries using high quality standardized data. Sibling correlation is an omnibus measure of mobility as it captures observed and unobserved family and neighborhood factors shared by siblings when growing up together. The estimates suggest that sibling correlation in schooling in developing countries is much higher (average 0.59) than that in developed countries (average 0.41). There is substantial spatial heterogeneity across regions, with Latin America and Caribbean having the highest (0.65) and Europe and Central Asia the lowest (0.48) estimates. Country level heterogeneity within a region is more pronounced. The evolution of sibling correlation suggests a variety of mobility experiences, with some regions registering a monotonically declining trend from the 1970s birth cohort to the 1990s birth cohort (Latin America and the Caribbean and East Asia and Pacific), while others remained trapped in stagnancy (South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa). The only region that experienced monotonically increasing sibling correlation is the Middle East and North Africa. The recent approach of Bingley and Cappellari (2019) is used to estimate the share of sibling correlation due to intergenerational transmission. The estimates show that when the homogeneity and independence assumptions implicit in the standard model of intergenerational transmission are relaxed, the estimated share is much larger. In the sample of countries, on average 74 percent of sibling correlation can be attributed to intergenerational transmission, while there are some countries where the share is more than 80 percent (most in Sub-Saharan Africa). This suggests a dominant role for parents in determining the educational opportunities of their children. Evidence on the evolution of the intergenerational share, however, suggests a declining importance of the intergenerational transmission component in many countries, but the pattern is diverse. In some cases, the trend in the intergenerational share is opposite to the trend in sibling correlation.

Assessing rent discounts implied by rent regulation is challenging because the counterfac- tual rents of regulated units in the unregulated market are not observed. We estimate these counterfactual rents and predict the quality-adjusted rent discount for each rent-stabilized unit in New York City (NYC) using novel data from 2002 to 2017. We find robust average rent discounts of $410 per month (34% of contract rents of stabilized units). The aggregate size of these discounts in NYC is between 4 to 5.4 billion USD per year, roughly 10-14% of the federal budget on means-tested housing programs. We document that discounts: (1) increase linearly with housing tenure; (2) are not progressively distributed; (3) are larger in Manhattan and increasing in gentrifying neighborhoods; and (4) are three times larger for households correctly aware of being beneficiaries. We find that rent stabilization has disproportionately benefited White tenants. Not only are they more likely to occupy rent-stabilized units conditional on observables, but they also receive higher discounts. On average, Black stabilized tenants get $150, Hispanics $135, and AAPI $43 less on monthly rent discounts than White stabilized ten- ants. This racial gap, which has shrunk over time, is mainly explained by the uneven sorting of households of different races across locations.

The authors show that for China the movement of more people into better jobs with higher incomes formed a very important explanation for the country’s long-term success in growth and poverty reduction. China’s exporting cities created a virtuous cycle of new wage-employment-creating investments by new businesses making new products. The rapid increase in urban labor demand drew hundreds of millions of workers from the rural “traditional” sector to the “modern” sector, providing them with more reliable waged incomes. This dramatically raised the share of waged employment in China’s economy and unleashed new middle-class demand for more income-elastic goods and services. Growth in urban wages was moderated by regulated rural to urban labor migration under the Hukou system. This raised returns to capital, which maintained business incentives to re-invest their profits in new goods and services for which new markets were opening. Production of cheaper manufactured goods for the world market was an important catalyst, but domestic demand for services in China has maintained the momentum.

We develop a model of intergenerational educational mobility incorporating gender bias against girls in the family, school, and labor market. Mobility and investment equations from the model are estimated for India using data not truncated by coresidency. The standard linear model misses important heterogeneity and yields misleading conclusions. Daughters of uneducated fathers face lower relative and absolute mobility (rural and urban). We find gender equality in absolute mobility for children of urban college educated fathers, but not in rural areas. Theoretical insights help understand the mechanisms. Parental nonfinancial inputs, unwanted girls, and patrilineal states are important for explaining the findings.

This paper incorporates gender bias against girls in the family, school and labor market in a model of intergenerational persistence in schooling where parents self-finance children's education because of credit market imperfections. Parents may underestimate a girl's ability, expect lower returns, and assign lower weights to their welfare (“pure son preference”). The model delivers the widely used linear conditional expectation function under constant returns and separability but generates an irrelevance result: parental bias does not affect relative mobility. With diminishing returns and complementarity, the conditional expectation function can be concave or convex, and parental bias affects both relative and absolute mobility. This paper tests these predictions in India and China using data not subject to coresidency bias. The evidence rejects the linear conditional expectation function in rural and urban India in favor of a concave relation. Girls in India face lower mobility irrespective of location when born to fathers with low schooling, but the gender gap closes when the father is college educated. In China, the conditional expectation function is convex for sons in urban areas, but linear in all other cases. The convexity supports the complementarity hypothesis of Becker et al. (2018) for the urban sons and leads to gender divergence in relative mobility for the children of highly educated fathers. In urban China, and urban and rural India, the mechanisms are underestimation of the ability of girls and unfavorable school environment. There is some evidence of pure son preference in rural India. The girls in rural China do not face bias in financial investment by parents, but they still face lower mobility when born to uneducated parents. Gender barriers in rural schools seem to be the primary mechanism.

Many children worldwide are left behind by parents who are migrating for work. While previous literature has studied the effect of parental migration on children's educational outcomes and cognitive achievements, this study focuses on how parental migration affects children's non-cognitive development. We use longitudinal data of children in rural China and adopt labor market conditions in destination provinces as instrumental variables for parental endogenous migration choice. We find that parental migration has a significant negative effect on children's non-cognitive development. Differentiating inter- and intra-provincial migrations suggests that the negative effect of parental migration is mainly driven by inter-provincial migrations. We test four different mechanisms of how parental migration affects child development including parental financial inputs, parental time inputs, household bargaining, and children's own time input. Our results provide insights into the relative importance of different mechanisms in determining the effect of parental migration on children's non-cognitive skill formation.