Congratulation, Fabian Koenings!

Congratulation!

Fabian Koenings (together with Jakob Schwab) published his paper “Accounting for Intergenerational Educational Immobility in Low- and Middle-Income Countries” in The Journal of Human Resources: Journal of Human Resources.External link

This paper was part of Fabian’s PhD thesis. 

What’s the paper about?

We analyze intergenerational educational immobility and its transmission channels across four developing countries: Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam. Using rich longitudinal data collected throughout childhood, we extract latent factors representing children’s attributes and environments.
We then decompose educational immobility, examining to what extent these factors mediate intergenerational persistence.

Key findings:
* Channels known to matter in developed countries (e.g., parental education) also play a key role here.
* Country-specific factors like underage parenthood and child labor additionally influence mobility.
* Interestingly, non-cognitive skills show no explanatory power in our settings.
* The importance of factors varies moderately across countries.

Why this is relevant for teaching?

This paper provides a solid conceptual introduction to social mobility, includes cross-country comparisons, and offers fully replicable code and data to conduct channel decompositions using a remarkably rich dataset – making it an ideal resource for classroom use or advanced seminars.
Happy to answer questions or exchange on applications in research or policy!

Congratulation for this great publication!