Intergenerational Mobility, Middle Sectors and Entrepreneurship in Uruguay

This paper estimates the relationship between parents educational attainment and income and children's schooling in Uruguay between 1982 and 2010. This relationship is interpreted as a measure of intergenerational social mobility, and the paper reports evidence that it has decreased over time. The paper finds that the probability that the children of the more educated remain among the more educated has grown, with analogous results for the less educated. As a result, the improvements in education of the 1980s and 1990s were unevenly distributed, with a bias against the disadvantaged. The paper also finds that while entrepreneurship status and belonging to the middle class matter in terms of social mobility as measured by compulsory education, i.e., primary school and the first three years of secondary school, they do not have a notable effect on noncompulsory education, i.e., the last three years of secondary school and higher.