Demographic Aspects of Intergenerational Transmission: Women's Schooling and the Schooling of the Next Generation

Vida Maralani, University of California, Los Angeles
Robert D. Mare, University of California, Los Angeles

The effect of socioeconomic characteristics in one generation on the socioeconomic achievement of the next generation is the central concern of social stratification research. Researchers typically address this issue by analyzing the associations between the characteristics of parents and offspring. This approach, however, focuses on observed parent-offspring pairs and ignores that changes in the characteristics of one generation may alter the numbers and types of family relationships that are created in the next one. In earlier work, we proposed new models of intergenerational effects that included demographic mechanisms such as marriage and fertility and made these endogenous to changes in women’s schooling. In the proposed work, we extend these models to include: differential timing of marriage and fertility; information on family structure in the transmission process; differential child and maternal mortality; and differences by cohort in the context of rapid demographic change. Our models are estimated using data on Indonesia.