How Do Mothers’ Educational Attainments Affect the Educational Attainment of the Next Generation?

Robert D. Mare, University of California, Los Angeles
Vida Maralani, University of California, Los Angeles

When researchers estimate the “intergenerational effects” of parents on offspring based on associations between offsprings’ and parents’ characteristics, they seldom specify how parents’ characteristics cause the socioeconomic attainment of the next generation. If, for example, mother’s education is a cause of her child’s attainment, then what is the effect on children of raising or lowering the schooling of a group of women? The association based on a sample of offspring can at best show the impact of changing a woman’s attainment level conditional upon her marrying and giving birth. The full impact of a woman’s education on her offspring’s education is weighted by the number and timing of her children and whether, when, and whom she marries. This paper applies new models for the effects of women’s educational attainment on children to data from Indonesia and compares conventional estimates of intergenerational effects with those based on a fuller demographic model.