Journal of Population Economics

, Volume 21, Issue 3, pp 719–749 | Cite as

Ethnic and parental effects on schooling outcomes before and during the transition: evidence from the Baltic countries

  • Mihails Hazans
  • Ija Trapeznikova
  • Olga Rastrigina
OriginalPaper
First Online:
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Accepted:

Abstract

This paper examines human capital gap between titular ethnicities and Russian-speaking minorities, which has emerged in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania during the transition and remains significant after controlling for parental education. For recent cohorts, unexplained gap is declining in Lithuania (despite absence of Russian language tertiary education) and in Estonia. Furthermore, we investigate intergenerational mobility in the Baltic countries. Parental education has a strong positive effect on propensity to obtain tertiary education, both in the Soviet era and post-Soviet period. Transition to the market has weakened mother’s education effect for titular ethnicities, while the opposite is true for minorities.

Keywords

Parental education Ethnic minorities Transition 

JEL Classification

J24 J15 P51 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge support by a grant from the CERGE-EI Foundation under a program of the Global Development Network. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and have not been endorsed by CERGE-EI or the GDN. NORBALT datasets were generously provided by the Fafo Institute for Applied Social Science in Oslo, Norway. Raul Eamets provided crucial help with Estonian LFS data. We thank Steven Rivkin, Randall Filer, Michael Spagat, Libor Dusek, two anonymous referees, and the editor (Christian Dustmann), who have read the previous versions of the paper and made very helpful comments. We also thank Jeffrey Smith, Raul Eamets, Tiiu Paas, Ott Toomet, as well as participants of GDN global conference “Research for Results in Education” (Prague, April 2005), and EALE 2006 conference (Prague, September 2006) for useful comments during presentations of the previous versions.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag 2007

Authors and Affiliations

  • Mihails Hazans
    • 1
  • Ija Trapeznikova
    • 2
  • Olga Rastrigina
    • 3
  1. 1.Faculty of EconomicsUniversity of LatviaRigaLatvia
  2. 2.Department of EconomicsNorthwestern University2001 Sheridan Road EvanstonUSA
  3. 3.BICEPSRigaLatvia

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