Gender Bias and Intergenerational Educational Mobility : Theory and Evidence from China and India
This paper incorporates gender bias against girls in the family, school and labor market in a model of intergenerational persistence in schooling where parents self-finance children's education because of credit market imperfections. Parents m...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2020
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/310771589823401020/Gender-Bias-and-Intergenerational-Educational-Mobility-Theory-and-Evidence-from-China-and-India http://hdl.handle.net/10986/33797 |
| Summary: | This paper incorporates gender bias
against girls in the family, school and labor market in a
model of intergenerational persistence in schooling where
parents self-finance children's education because of
credit market imperfections. Parents may underestimate a
girl's ability, expect lower returns, and assign lower
weights to their welfare (“pure son preference”). The model
delivers the widely used linear conditional expectation
function under constant returns and separability but
generates an irrelevance result: parental bias does not
affect relative mobility. With diminishing returns and
complementarity, the conditional expectation function can be
concave or convex, and parental bias affects both relative
and absolute mobility. This paper tests these predictions in
India and China using data not subject to coresidency bias.
The evidence rejects the linear conditional expectation
function in rural and urban India in favor of a concave
relation. Girls in India face lower mobility irrespective of
location when born to fathers with low schooling, but the
gender gap closes when the father is college educated. In
China, the conditional expectation function is convex for
sons in urban areas, but linear in all other cases. The
convexity supports the complementarity hypothesis of Becker
et al. (2018) for the urban sons and leads to gender
divergence in relative mobility for the children of highly
educated fathers. In urban China, and urban and rural India,
the mechanisms are underestimation of the ability of girls
and unfavorable school environment. There is some evidence
of pure son preference in rural India. The girls in rural
China do not face bias in financial investment by parents,
but they still face lower mobility when born to uneducated
parents. Gender barriers in rural schools seem to be the
primary mechanism. |
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