Gender Bias and Intergenerational Educational Mobility : Theory and Evidence from China and India

Emran, M. Shahe ; Jiang, Hanchen ; Shilpi, Forhad

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: GENDER BIAS;    INTERGENERATIONAL MOBILITY;    RETURNS TO EDUCATION;    BECKER-TOMES MODEL;    COMPLEMENTARITY;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-9250
RP-ID  :  WPS9250

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

This paper incorporates gender biasagainst girls in the family, school and labor market in amodel of intergenerational persistence in schooling whereparents self-finance children's education because ofcredit market imperfections. Parents may underestimate agirl's ability, expect lower returns, and assign lowerweights to their welfare (“pure son preference”). The modeldelivers the widely used linear conditional expectationfunction under constant returns and separability butgenerates an irrelevance result: parental bias does notaffect relative mobility. With diminishing returns andcomplementarity, the conditional expectation function can beconcave or convex, and parental bias affects both relativeand absolute mobility. This paper tests these predictions inIndia and China using data not subject to coresidency bias.The evidence rejects the linear conditional expectationfunction in rural and urban India in favor of a concaverelation. Girls in India face lower mobility irrespective oflocation when born to fathers with low schooling, but thegender gap closes when the father is college educated. InChina, the conditional expectation function is convex forsons in urban areas, but linear in all other cases. Theconvexity supports the complementarity hypothesis of Beckeret al. (2018) for the urban sons and leads to genderdivergence in relative mobility for the children of highlyeducated fathers. In urban China, and urban and rural India,the mechanisms are underestimation of the ability of girlsand unfavorable school environment. There is some evidenceof pure son preference in rural India. The girls in ruralChina do not face bias in financial investment by parents,but they still face lower mobility when born to uneducatedparents. Gender barriers in rural schools seem to be theprimary mechanism.