Growing up together: sibling correlation, parental influence, and intergenerational educational mobility in developing countries

We present 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 (DHS). This is the first paper, to our knowledge, 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, community, and school 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, Latin America and Caribbean with the highest (0.65) and Europe and Central Asia with 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 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 Middle East and North Africa. We take advantage of the recent approach of Bingley and Cappellari (2019) to estimate the share of sibling correlation due to intergenerational transmission. We find that relaxing the homogeneity and independence assumptions implicit in the standard model of intergenerational transmission makes the estimated share much larger. In our 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 the parents in determining educational opportunities of 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 very diverse. In some cases, the trend in the intergenerational share is opposite to the trend in sibling correlation.