Article

Does Improved Local Supply of Schooling Enhance Intergenerational Mobility in Education? Evidence from Jordan

Ragui Assaad et Mohamed Saleh

Résumé

This paper examines the effect of increased local supply of schooling on intergenerational mobility in education in Jordan. We use a unique data set that links individual data on own schooling and parents’ schooling for adults, from a household survey, with the annual supply of schools in the sub-district of birth, from a school census. We identify the effect by exploiting the variation in the supply of basic and secondary public schools across cohorts and sub-districts of birth in Jordan, controlling for both cohort and sub-district of birth fixed effects. School availability is determined based on the number of sex-appropriate public schools in the individual’s sub-district of birth at the time the individual was ready to start that schooling stage. Our findings show that the local availability of basic public schools does in fact increase intergenerational mobility in education. For instance, an increase in the supply of basic public schools of one school per 1,000 people reduces the father-son and mother-son associations of schooling by 10 percent and the father-daughter and mother-daughter associations by nearly 30 percent. However, an increase in the local supply of secondary public schools does not seem to have a similar effect on intergenerational mobility in education.

Mots-clés

Supply of schooling; education; intergenerational mobility; inequality of opportunity; Middle East;

Codes JEL

  • I24: Education and Inequality
  • I28: Government Policy

Remplace

Ragui Assaad et Mohamed Saleh, « Does Improved Local Supply of Schooling Enhance Intergenerational Mobility in Education? Evidence from Jordan », TSE Working Paper, n° 15-549, janvier 2015, révision août 2015.

Référence

Ragui Assaad et Mohamed Saleh, « Does Improved Local Supply of Schooling Enhance Intergenerational Mobility in Education? Evidence from Jordan », The World Bank Economic Review, septembre 2016.

Publié dans

The World Bank Economic Review, septembre 2016