Faculty of Business Seminar Series/ Orhan Torul

Title: Intergenerational Educational Mobility in Europe

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the empirical evolution of intergenerational educational mobility in Europe at country and country group scales. We first show that intergenerational educational persistence, i.e. educational immobility probability across generations, displays considerable heterogeneity, both in level and in trend, across countries and country groups: Mediterranean, Post-Socialist, Nordic and the Rest of Europe. We next report that intergenerational educational mobility dynamics display further heterogeneity over educational composition of parental couples, gender of descendants and their parental financial status. We also document the evolution of educational inequality patterns in Europe, and investigate how educational inequality and intergenerational mobility figures interact with each other. We report that intergenerational educational elasticity correlates positively with educational inequality, thus the Educational Great Gatsby hypothesis holds true in Europe. We further show that the link between equality of educational opportunity, a set of measures that capture how de facto high education prospects of descendants vary over their parental education, and educational inequality is present, as well.

Place: Meeting Room AB2-345