Abstract
We extend the Becker-Tomes model to a rural economy with farm-nonfarm occupational dualism to study intergenerational educational mobility in rural China and India. Using data free of coresidency bias, we find that fathers’ nonfarm occupation and education were complementary in determining sons schooling in India, but separable in China. Sons faced lower mobility in India irrespective of fathers’ occupation. Sensitivity analysis using the Altonji et al. (J. Polit. Econ. 113(1), 151–84, 2005) approach suggests that genetic correlations alone could explain the intergenerational persistence in China, but not in India. Farm-nonfarm differences in returns to education, and geographic mobility are plausible mechanisms behind the contrasting cross-country evidence.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Forhad Shilpi for help with REDS data and insightful comments throughout this project, and to Yang Huang for help with the CFPS data. We would like to thank the participants in Equal Chances conference 2018, and LACEA conference 2019, and Matthew Lindquist, Guido Neidhofer, Reshad Ahsan, Koen Decancq, and Hanchen Jiang for helpful comments on an earlier draft and Rakesh Gupta Nichanametla Ramasubbaiah for excellent research assistance. An earlier version of the paper was titled “Intergenerational Educational Mobility in the Rural Economy: Evidence from China and India”. This project was partially funded by World Bank RSB. The standard disclaimers apply.
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Emran, M.S., Ferreira, F.H., Jiang, Y. et al. Occupational dualism and intergenerational educational mobility in the rural economy: evidence from China and India. J Econ Inequal 21, 743–773 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-023-09599-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-023-09599-1