Intergenerational Educational Mobility : is there a religion effect in France?

This paper explores intergenerational educational mobility for three groups of individuals: Christian natives, Christian immigrants and Muslim immigrants. We develop an econometric specification for educational attainment which shows that a higher level of parent education increases differently the child education among the three groups with a special advantage for daughters. We find higher intergenerational correlation for Christian natives than for Muslims immigrants, but an intermediate level for Christian immigrants. For the three communities, we show an advantage for mother education; however this advantage differs between daughters and sons. Furthermore, we find significant effects of family variables such as birth order, family size or sibling composition which vary among the three groups. The gap between Christian and Muslim immigrants remains approximately low and a possible convergence of education levels is possible given an educational system mainly public and free.