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

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 supply of schooling in the sub-district of birth, from Ministry of Education data. We identify the effect by exploiting the variation in the supply of basic and secondary schools over time and across sub-districts in Jordan, controlling for both cohort and sub-district fixed effects. School availability is determined based on the existence of a sex-appropriate school 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 schools does in fact increase intergenerational mobility in schooling. For instance, an increase in the supply of basic schools of one school per 10,000 people reduces the association between father and son and mother and son schooling by 10 percent and that between father-daughter and mother-daughter by nearly 30 percent. An increase in the local supply of secondary schools does not seem to have a similar effect on intergenerational mobility in education.