Educational Inequality of Opportunity and Mobility in Europe

TL;DR

This paper analyzes educational inequality of opportunity and mobility across Europe, introducing robust estimators and revealing significant influence of circumstances like mother's education on inequality and mobility patterns.

Contribution

It proposes debiased IOp estimators based on Gini and MLD, and provides new insights into the determinants and intergenerational persistence of educational inequality in Europe.

Findings

Circumstances explain 38-74% of educational inequality.

Mother's education is the most influential circumstance.

High income IOp countries tend to have high educational IOp and low mobility.

Abstract

Educational attainment generates labor market returns, societal gains and has intrinsic value for individuals. We study Inequality of Opportunity (IOp) and intergenerational mobility in the distribution of educational attainment. We propose to use debiased IOp estimators based on the Gini coefficient and the Mean Logarithmic Deviation (MLD) which are robust to machine learning biases. We also measure the effect of each circumstance on IOp, we provide tests to compare IOp in two populations and to test joint significance of a group of circumstances. We find that circumstances explain between 38\% and 74\% of total educational inequality in European countries. Mother's education is the most important circumstance in most countries. There is high intergenerational persistence and there is evidence of an educational Great Gatsby curve. We also construct IOp aware educational Great Gatsby curves and find that high income IOp countries are also high educational IOp and less mobile countries.