Intergenerational education mobility and the level of development

The main goal of this paper is to analyze the empirical relationship between economic development and intergenerational education mobility. By exploiting large regional variation in the level of economic development across Turkey, we find that educational outcomes of daughters who grow up in more developed regions depend less on their parents’ educational outcomes. We do not find evidence for a similar relationship between development and mobility for males. Moreover, the development level of place of residence during childhood has a stronger positive association with intergenerational education mobility compared to the development level of place of residence during adolesence. We find that regions that feature higher school availability, greater level of social capital, more favorable cultural attitudes toward women, higher level of home resources, and lower degree of educational inequalities also tend to feature higher degree of intergenerational mobility.