Intergenerational Education Mobility
Effects of Family and State in Malaysia
In this paper, the authors explore evidence concerning the relationship between parents' and children's education using a new body of data, the Second Malaysian Family Life Survey (MFLS-2), which contains information on the education of as many as four generations within a given family. These data allow the authors to study the spread of education in Malaysia over much of this century by examining the educational attainment of birth cohorts from 1910 to 1980. More significantly, the authors use these data to study the effects of parental education on the progress of their children through elementary, secondary, and post-secondary school within a sequential discrete-time hazard model, which allows for correlations among unmeasured family and individual-specific components. For a subset of the cohorts, the authors are able to introduce time-varying covariates to measure a family's economic circumstances, the quality of its environment, and the composition of the subset at the time a given decision is made.
Originally published in: The Journal of Human Resources, v. 29, no. 4, Fall 1994, pp. 1126-1166.
This report is part of the RAND Corporation Reprint series. The Reprint was a product of the RAND Corporation from 1992 to 2011 that represented previously published journal articles, book chapters, and reports with the permission of the publisher. RAND reprints were formally reviewed in accordance with the publisher's editorial policy and compliant with RAND's rigorous quality assurance standards for quality and objectivity. For select current RAND journal articles, see External Publications.
This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited; linking directly to this product page is encouraged. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial purposes. For information on reprint and reuse permissions, please visit www.rand.org/pubs/permissions.
The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.