Like Father Like Son?The Mechanism And Scale Of Intergenerational Transmission Of Education In China

Intergenerational social mobility has a significantly positive impact on economic growth. The intergenerational transmission of human capital affects the efficiency of economic as well as social equity by influencing employment and income. Since education has always been an important component of human capital, children with more educated parents usually tend to receive more education. Is this because parents with higher education are generally more wealthy to provide their children with better nutrition and living environment so that the children have more advantage in study, or it’s the parents’ability their children inherited that enables children to receive more education. To distinguish this phenomenon has important policy implication.By using the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) data of 2013, we analyze the factors affecting intergenerational transmission of education in China and explore the mechanism and scale of it. We find that the intergenerational education elasticity of parents to their biological children is larger than that of parents to their nonbio logical children, which means genetic factors affect intergenerational transmission to some extent. However, with further study, we find that nurture factors such as family income and hukou status also has significant impact on children’s education attainment. Therefore, we suggest that policy reform should pay more attention in allowing individuals have equal access to receiving education, meanwhile, the gap between urban and rural China should be narrowed so that vulnerable groups can benefit from being educated and promoting the mobility of society.