| This dissertation analyzes how intergenerational relations influence educational attainment, especially in developing countries. The strategy adopted to analyze this question consists of (a) estimating and comparing intergenerational education mobility across countries, (b) creating an economic model to understand how family background influences education decisions in a context of liquidity constraints, and (c) evaluating higher education financing reforms in terms of their implications on intergenerational education mobility.;Chapter 1 measures intergenerational education mobility in twenty countries around the world, and is the first cross-country study to use actual educational attainments of two generations of adults. Countries with high income per capita, such as the United States, do not necessarily appear at the top of the international ranking of mobility. Differences in the probability of facing liquidity constraints depending on parental education appears consistently related with intergenerational mobility. This chapter also shows that countries mainly differ in terms of their education mobility for the group of individuals with the lowest levels of parental education.;Chapter 2 is more theoretical. It develops a model of human capital investment decisions in a context of liquidity constraints. The main characteristic of this model is that it derives, for the first time to the extent of my knowledge, the optimal human capital investment decision when no borrowing is available. This is especially important for developing countries, where either a very small part of the population has access to the credit market or no credit market exists at all. A direct implication of the model is that the cost of education for a family, in terms of current utility, depends on family income. This result implies that policies that tend to relax the income restriction of poor families do not only make the investment in human capital possible, but make it also an optimal decision.;The final chapter extends the model developed in chapter three to a general equilibrium model. The main objective of this chapter is to analyze the implications of different financing schemes of the higher education system on intergenerational education mobility. In addition, this chapter addresses the relationship between economic growth and intergenerational education mobility. |
