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This study used data from the General Social Survey (2011) to examine the trends in intergenerational educational mobility in Canada for the 1940–1989 birth cohorts. To this end, the purpose of this study is to focus on the relationship between mothers' education and children's education.

The study estimated intergenerational regression and correlation coefficients and several mobility indices, namely, the Prais–Shorrocks index, immobility index, upward mobility index and downward mobility index.

The study found considerable gender differences with respect to the trends in these coefficients and indices. The study found that, over the period of study, the correlation coefficient slightly increased for sons while it decreased for daughters. The Prais–Shorrocks index, immobility index, upward mobility index and downward mobility index show that educational mobility has increased for daughters while that of sons has decreased over time. Finally, the relative educational opportunities indicators also suggest a similar result that educational mobility has increased for the daughters while it fell for the sons.

A number of studies used Canadian data to examine intergenerational educational mobility. However, no study particularly focused on the relationship between mothers' education and children's education. In recent years, women's labor force participation rate and employment rate increased significantly. Thus, it will be interesting to see how mothers' education is related to children's education in Canada.

A few studies in India have related daughters’ education to their fathers, but there is little to no evidence when it comes to the intergenerational relation between daughters and mothers’ education. Using India Human Development Survey (IHDS) 2011–2012, the purpose of this paper is to investigate intergenerational educational mobility among women (15–49 years) (vis-à-vis their mothers) for all India.

The study uses transition/mobility matrices and multiple mobility measures for the examination of intergenerational educational mobility among women (15–49 years) in India. The data have been taken from the “India Human Development Survey 2011-12.”

Findings indicate that intergenerational educational mobility at the all-India level is about 0.69, that is, 69 percent of the women acquire a level of education different from their mothers. Of the overall mobility, about 80 percent is contributed by upward mobility whereas the rest is downward. Mobility is greater in urban areas and is highest among the socially advantaged “Others” (or upper) caste group. Also, the upward component is substantially lower for socially disadvantaged groups compared to others. Further, there are large inter-regional variations, with the situation being worst in the central and eastern states such as Uttaranchal, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, etc. Moreover, mobility (overall and upward) increases consistently as one moves up the income distribution.

This study is perhaps the first study which comprehensively studies intergenerational educational mobility for women (15–49 years) at an all-India level. Findings not only capture the mobility at the aggregate level but also for different caste groups as well as regional variations and income effect.

This paper analyzes the impact of family background characteristics and social exclusion features on the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment and income positions, and the relative poverty risk in Germany and the United States. These countries vary widely by welfare regime, family role patterns, and labor market settings. From these differences we predict higher intergenerational income elasticities in the United States and higher intergenerational educational elasticities in Germany. Using longitudinal data from the Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF) 1980–2008, we find some empirical support for these hypotheses. In both countries, parental educational attainment stimulates intergenerational economic and social mobility, which accentuates the importance of promoting human capital accumulation.

This chapter explores the relation between personal well-being – measured with life satisfaction – and intergenerational mobility in Spain (2017). We start by applying machine learning techniques to overcome traditional data limitations and estimate intergenerational income mobility. Then, by means of several econometric specifications, we find the relation between personal well-being and intergenerational income mobility to be non-significant. This result is robust to several measures of educational and occupational mobility. Contrary to the comparison theory, if Spanish citizens derive well-being benefits or losses from intergenerational mobility, these effects are not permanent and dissipate with time. We find other variables, such as enjoying good health, higher income levels and marriage, to be positively associated with life satisfaction. Overall, personal well-being in Spain is more related to materialistic aspects rather than to the comparison of individuals’ current position against the previous generations’ socio-economic status.

The main aim of this study is to investigate the role of fathers and mothers in the intergenerational educational persistence for sons and daughters under two dimensions that characterize the clusters of countries: redistributive policy and governance.

Data from the Global Database of Intergenerational Mobility (GDIM), hierarchical cluster analysis on principal components and panel regression are used in this study to estimate intergenerational educational correlation and to investigate its determinants related to the parents’ and descendants’ education variables in 93 countries grouped in four clusters. The empirical analysis is differentiated by gender combinations of parents and descendants.

In the clusters of countries characterized by high inequalities and poor governance, our findings show that the role of the fathers is stronger than that of the mothers in educational transmission; fathers and mothers are more influential for the daughters rather than for the sons; parental educational privilege is the main driver of intergenerational educational persistence; there is an inverse U-curve in the association between educational inequality of the parents and educational correlation for the sons. Differently, in the countries characterized by high income, low redistributive conflict and better governance, the role of the mothers is stronger and education mobility for the daughters is higher than that for the sons.

The authors’ results remark on the importance of social welfare policies aimed to expand a meritocratic public education system including schooling transfers for lower social class students and narrowing the gender gap in educational mobility between daughters and sons. Social welfare policies should also be oriented to spread high quality child care systems that help to foster greater women equality in the labor market, because the strength of educational persistence depends on the position of the mother in the economic hierarchy.

The distinctiveness of the paper can be found in the fact that this study investigates the parental role differentiating by gender and coupling hierarchical cluster analysis on principal components with panel regression models. This allows us to have a sample of 93 countries aggregated in four groups defined in two dimensions: redistributive policy and governance. Amongst the determinants of educational transmission, we consider not only education’s years of the parents but also other determinants, such as educational inequality and privilege of the parents. We also identify the effects of investment in human capital and educational inequalities for the descendants on education mobility.

Social mobility research starts conventionally from the children's generation and looks at group-specific individual life chances. However, an immediate interpretation of these results as measures of social reproduction is often misleading. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of a related but alternative approach which looks at intergenerational links from the perspective of the parents’ generation. It asks about the consequences of social inequality in this generation for the following generation(s). This includes questions of how the parental origin context is formed, whether there are any children at all and when they were born as well as the aspect of these children's relative chances of attaining particular social positions. As an empirical example, the paper describes patterns of educational reproduction in (West) Germany during the mid- and late 20th century. Simulations allow assessing the relative importance of various partial processes of social reproduction. A large proportion of the observed levels of educational reproduction can be attributed to family-related processes such as union formation. Drawing together analyses from various areas, the paper combines questions of social mobility research with a demographic perspective and broadens the analytical basis of inequality research for systematic comparative research.

This chapter estimates the degree of intergenerational educational mobility in Argentina, focusing on the mobility differences between teenagers and young adults. Based on a new database, the Survey of Employment and Education of Youth (CEDLAS-INDEC) nonbiased mobility estimators for children older than teenagers is obtained. Our robust estimations reveal a lower degree of intergenerational mobility for young adults than for teenagers. Furthermore, young adult immobility is not uniform across parents’ education level. Finally, gender differences also affect mobility.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the intergenerational occupational mobility for young women (vis-à-vis their mothers) in India and six of its states from its diverse geographic regions which contribute 39 percent of the Indian population.

The study uses transition/mobility matrices and multiple mobility measures for examination of intergenerational occupational mobility among young females in India by using the data from the “India Youth Survey: Situation and Needs” from the year 2006 to 2007.

The study finds that intergenerational occupational mobility among the young women in India is about 71 percent, but surprisingly it is predominantly downwards. The urban areas have higher occupational mobility than the rural areas. However, upward intergenerational occupational mobility is lower among the young SC/ST women compared to the young women belonging to the “Others” caste category. Moreover, upward mobility in the economically and demographically poorer states is much lower than that of other states.

The present study is the only study which examines how women perform vis-à-vis their mothers in terms of occupational attainment in the Indian context.

This study examines the extent to which educational outcomes are transmitted from mothers to daughters in rural China. An analysis of the 2010 China Family Panel Survey reveals that: (i) how far daughters go in their education is strongly associated with their mothers’ education; (ii) the association between mothers’ and daughters’ educational outcomes in rural China was found to be stronger than the corresponding relationships between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, and fathers and sons, especially at higher levels of education; and (iii) while having more brothers and being born later worsens daughters’ educational outcomes, mothers’ higher education effectively mitigates these negative effects. These findings add to a growing body of literature and empirical evidence that challenges conventional social mobility research paradigms that neglect mothers’ roles. More importantly, the distinction between mother–daughter relationship and that between fathers and daughters and mothers and sons highlights the fact that education is likely transmitted intergenerationally via mechanisms that differ depending on the gendered parent–child pairs.