Articles

Occupational dualism and intergenerational educational mobility in the rural economy: evidence from China and India

December 4, 2023
Stack of books on a table

This paper was originally published in the Journal of Economic Inequality.

Yajing Jiang and her coauthors study the intergenerational educational mobility in developing economies. Using data sets that are free from the well-known co-residency biases, they find that fathers’ non-agricultural occupation and education were complementary to determining sons’ schooling choices in rural India, but separable in rural China. Additionally, sons face lower occupational mobility in rural India than in rural China, irrespective of fathers’ occupation. The differences in the returns to education in the agricultural/non-agricultural occupations could possibly explain the divergent findings in these two economies.

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