Intergenerational Educational Mobility: evidence from three approaches for Brazil,Chile, Uruguay and the USA (1995-2006)

In this paper we estimate intergenerational educational mobility for Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and the USA along the period 1995-2006. We propose an in- dex of intergenerational mobility based on the variance decomposition in an error-components model. We estimate three indexes of mobility: one based on the autoregressive Markov-chain regression, the second is the Dahan-Gaviria index and the last one is the index proposed in this work. We use data of teenagers and parents education and address the issue of top-censoring. We distinguish between relative and absolute mobility. We draw empirical conclusions for each country and compare results. We analyze theoretical and empirical attributes of indexes.