Intergenerational Transmission of Education: Gender and Ethnicity in Guatemala

Not much is known about the process of intergenerational transmission of educational attainment in the developing world, mainly due to the lack of longitudinal datasets. There is however reason to believe that the high degree of inequality as well as stratification prevalent in developing countries may contribute to greater persistence in the intergenerational transmission of opportunities. If schooling is strongly affected by family background, then intergenerational correlation in education across families will be high and social mobility will be low. This paper describes the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment in Guatemala through the degree of regression to the mean of the schooling of children compared to the schooling of their parents, interpreted as a measure of equality of opportunity in Guatemalan society. The approach extends the study of the process of intergenerational transmission of educational attainment in the developing world, to include ethnicity and gender as factors associated with this process. Using several specifications, the results show that educational achievement exhibits higher persistence from generation to generation among indigenous people, and for women. The work also explores the effect of high inequality in the distribution of assets between the white and indigenous ethnic groups on social mobility; and extends the analysis to investigate whether there is heterogeneity in the degree of persistence across the conditional education distribution using a Quantile Regression for counts model. Results clearly show systematic differences in the degree of persistence in educational attainment according to ethnicity with indigenous people being less mobile than whites. Overall, the analysis shows that people do not tend to regress to the mean of the population in terms of their educational attainment -a sing of relative equality of opportunity-, but it rather seems that an individual’s education and chances in life are strongly correlated with those of his parents.