Multigenerational Education Mobility in Europe : Exploring the Mechanism1

This paper studies multigenerational education mobility across three generations and sheds light on the mechanism behind it. We employ mediation analysis to decompose the raw association between the education of grandparents and grandchildren into different mediating factors, including the social-economic status (SES) of grandparents and parents. The advantage of mediation analysis is that it not only considers the direct effects of grandparental and parental characteristics, but it also quantifies the indirect effects of grandparents on the youngest generation via parental characteristics. Further, our estimation is based on the lifecycle theory of human capital accumulation. In our preferred specification, we show that 40 percent of the raw association of education between parents and grandparents is explained by the socio-economic status and education of grandparents and 60 by the education of parents. Although overall magnitude of raw association between education of grandparents and grandchildren differ across countries, our model suggests that the cross-country differences in overall effect of the grandparents are surprisingly small