Social Mobility in Germany

Dodin, Majed; Findeisen, Sebastian; Henkel, Lukas; Sachs, Dominik and Schüle, Paul (15. November 2021): Social Mobility in Germany. Collaborative Research Center Transregio 190, Discussion Paper No. 298

Abstract

We characterize intergenerational mobility in Germany using census data on educational attainment and parental income for 526,000 children. Our measure of educational attainment is the A-Level degree, a requirement for access to university. A 10 percentile increase in the parental income rank is associated with a 5.2 percentage point increase in the A-Level share. This parental income gradient has not changed for the birth cohorts of 1980-1996, despite a large-scale policy of expanding upper secondary education. At the regional level, there exists substantialvariation in mobility estimates. Place effects, rather than sorting of households, account for most of these differences

• Item Type: Paper
• Keywords: Intergenerational Mobility, Educational Attainment, Local Labor Markets
• Faculties: Economics > Collaborative Research Center Transregio "Rationality and Competition"
• Subjects: 300 Social sciences > 330 Economics
• JEL Classification: I24, J62, R23
• Language: English