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Publications (35)
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This study is positioned in two strands of literature—intersectionality and social mobility. It is the first to measure (dis)advantage at the individual level as an outcome of the intersectionality of identities and parental circumstances. By linking circumstances at the parental level with (dis...
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We examine how village-level social group dominance affects the educational and occupational mobility of minority and other social groups in rural India across multiple generations. We distinguish between upper caste and own-group dominance and examine the mechanisms underpinning inequality in...
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While there is extensive literature examining the growth and development effects of foreign aid, very little attention has been paid to its potential impact on social mobility. Thus, this paper provides the first empirical evidence on the effects of foreign aid on intergenerational educational...
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– A new set of estimates for Indonesia by gender, geography, and generation
Various scholars have estimated levels of intergenerational mobility in OECD countries. Fewer estimates are available for developing countries, where mobility arguably matters more due to starker differences in living standards. This paper presents new estimates of mobility for a developing country...
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The impact of childbirth on women’s employment has been discussed extensively in the context of developed countries. Constraints on mothers’ labour market participation and consequent fall in earnings are characterized as the ‘motherhood penalty’. This phenomenon is relatively less explored in...
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– Disentangling the interdependencies
Climate change is expected to increase the risk in agricultural production due to increasing temperatures and rainfall variability. Smallholders can adjust by diversifying income sources, including through migration. Most existing studies investigate whether households send a migrant after...
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The impact of childbirth on the labour market participation of women has been discussed extensively in the context of developed countries, constraints on mothers’ labour market participation and earnings being characterized as the ‘motherhood penalty’. In the developing country context, and...
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We suggest a simple and flexible criterion to assess inter-generational mobility. It accommodates different types of outcomes (continuous outcomes such as potential earnings, or discrete ones such as education groups) and captures dynastic improvements of such outcomes at different points of the...
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– Are there gender differences in Ghana?
Historically, the issue of intergenerational evolution of income, wealth, and socioeconomic status has been the subject of considerable research in the analysis of inequality. Such intergenerational linkages are anticipated to come from two sources: first, the inheritance of innate abilities and...
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Most studies of intergenerational mobility focus on adjacent generations, and there is limited knowledge about multigenerational mobility—that is, status transmission across three generations. We examine multigenerational educational and occupational mobility in India, using a nationally...
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– Evidence from Cameroon
We examine the intergenerational mobility of women relative to men, using paired mother-daughter and father-son data on occupation and education for Cameroon. We find that both in occupation and education, intergenerational mobility is higher for sons than for daughters. The intergenerational...
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– Experimental evidence from Rwanda
This paper investigates the short- and medium-term impact of a randomized group-based early child development programme targeting parents of children aged six to 24 months in a poor, rural district of Rwanda. The programme engaged parents through sessions that included a radio show and facilitated...
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In societies where surnames are inherited from parents, we can use these names to estimate rates of intergenerational mobility. This paper explains how to make such estimates, and illustrates their use in pre-industrial England and modern Chile and India. These surname estimates have the advantage...
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This paper develops a normative approach to the measurement of ex-ante inequality of opportunity in a multidimensional setting—that is, when the individual outcome is represented by a multidimensional variable. We characterize three classes of social welfare functions, all endorsing ex-ante...
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– The role of shocks and measurement error
Standard growth incidence curves describe how growth episodes impact on the overall income distribution. However, measuring the pro-poorness of the growth process is complex due to (i) measurement errors and (ii) effect shocks that may hit the percentiles of the income distribution in different ways...
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The ethnographic approach has much to contribute to our understanding of social mobility.This paper provides a discussion on ethnography as a method and approach to writing and description, and reviews some ways in which themes related to social mobility in the developing world have been explored...
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– Measurement (and downward mobility) pitfalls
Limited attention has been paid to how well social mobility measures debated and used to study industrial countries perform in analysis of low-income settings. Following brief, selective reviews of the axiomatic and econometric literatures, three mobility concepts illustrate how properties that...
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The relationship between social mobility and inequality is well studied in the literature, but far greater attention has been paid to ‘vertical’ than to ‘horizontal’ inequality. This paper focuses on mobility and horizontal inequality between ethnic, racial, and culturally-defined groups. Not only...
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– Recent approaches and evidence
This paper examines income mobility in developing countries. We start by synthesizing findings from the available evidence on relative mobility and poverty dynamics. We then describe evidence on economic mobility obtained via synthetic panels constructed from cross-section data. We echo earlier...
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Empirical studies in developing countries tend to find higher levels of socioeconomic persistence across generations compared with those of high-income economies. However, there have been relatively few advances in the identification of the drivers of such higher levels of intergenerational...
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– A case study of a quantitative sociological approach to social mobility research in the Global South
This study analyses intergenerational class mobility in China as a case study of a quantitative sociological approach to social mobility research in the Global South. Drawing on national representative surveys collected between 2010 and 2015 in China, the analysis focuses on absolute and relative...
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We review the literature on pathways through which social networks may influence social mobility in developing countries. We find that social networks support members in tangible ways—via access to opportunities for migration, credit, trading relationships, information on jobs, and new technologies...
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– Where they move and why prices matter
Traditional economic models predict rural to urban migration during the structural transformation of an economy. In middle-income countries, it is less clear which direction of migration to expect. In this paper I show that in Brazil as many people move out of as into metropolitan cities, and they...
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– Evidence from East Africa
Inequalities in children’s learning are widely recognized to arise from variations in both household- and school-related factors. While few studies have considered the role of sorting between schools and households, even fewer have quantified how much sorting contributes to educational inequalities...
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– Exploring gender attitudes and women’s labour force participation
Women have historically been overlooked in research on social mobility. In contrast, new research focuses on the intergenerational transmission of gender attitudes and norms as determinants of women’s labour force participation in industrialized countries. This paper discusses the measurement of...
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This paper has two purposes. The first is to define clearly different social mobility concepts and components. The second is to embed these concepts and components into a larger context of social mobility research. The core of the paper develops six mobility concepts and their measures as well as...
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As developing countries rapidly urbanize, the number of people living in ‘slums’—neighbourhoods lacking property rights and basic services—continues to increase. Whether slum residents will ultimately share in the benefits of the cities they help build or will remain trapped in poverty is not well...
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– A mixed-methods investigation
This paper examines the extent and determinants of structural poverty dynamics in South Africa, focusing on the socio-economically disadvantaged urban African population. The quantitative analysis using panel data is triangulated with evidence from a qualitative case study integrating focus group...
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– Measures, methods, and challenges in developing countries
This paper provides a critical survey and synthesis of the recent economic literature on intergenerational mobility in developing countries, with a focus on data and methodological challenges. The attenuation due to measurement error is compounded by sample truncation resulting from co-residency and...
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– Conceptual issues and empirical findings
This paper discusses current methods for measuring and analysing occupational mobility, and the way in which methods designed for the analysis of developing countries may need to be modified when applied in other contexts. The paper discusses particular features of some developing societies, such as...
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This paper reviews the small but growing literature on intergenerational educational mobility in the developing world. Education is a critical determinant of economic well-being, and it predicts a range of non-pecuniary outcomes such as marriage, fertility, health, crime, and political attitudes. We...
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Parental human capital and endowments may affect children’s human capital, which in turn may affect children’s earning and occupations and thus affect social mobility. This paper focuses on what we know about these possible links in low- and middle-income countries. It starts with definitions of...
Displaying 32 of 35 results