Intergenerational Educational Mobility and Race: A Positional Approach Comparing Brazil and Mexico.

In this paper, we present investigations on intergenerational educational mobility across racial groups in Brazil and Mexico over birth cohorts born between the 1950s and 1980s. To compare mobility rates across racial groups we use three complementary methodological approaches. First, we study intergenerational educational mobility following a positional approach. Instead of the usual absolute education measures based on years of schooling and/or credential cut points (i.e., elementary, secondary, etc.), we measure education in terms of the positions in the entire educational distribution for each birth cohort. In other words, for each birth cohort, we obtain the percentile distribution of education and calculate mobility rates based on these percentile distributions. The theoretical idea informing this relative measure is that education is a positional good. What matters is the relative position in the educational distribution – for example, if no one has secondary education this level will be the top, but if everyone completed high school the top will be a higher educational level. Therefore, we compare intergenerational mobility in terms of the percentile distribution of education for each birth cohort. Second, we use a kernel estimation methodology to smooth or linearize the educational percentile distributions (Karlson, 2023). It is well known that educational distributions tend to concentrate on certain values corresponding to important educational thresholds, which makes educational percentile distributions lumpy. The kernel estimation method smoothens the educational distribution and facilitates the calculation of percentiles. Finally, our third methodological approach is to use a non-parametric measure of upward and downward mobility: upward transition probability (UTP) and downward transition probability (DTP). These measures allow us to observe if adult children are in upper or lower positions in the educational percentile distribution of their birth cohort vis a vis the position their parents had in their educational percentile distribution.