Are high school degrees and university diplomas equally heritable in the US? A new measure of relative intergenerational mobility

Abstract: This paper proposes a new measure of relative intergenerational mobility along the educational trait as a proxy of inequality of opportunity. The new measure is more suitable for controlling for the variations in the trait distributions of individuals and their parents than the commonly used intergenerational persistence coefficient. This point is illustrated by our empirical analysis of US census data from the period between 1960 and 2015: we show that controlling for the variations in the trait distributions adequately is vital in assessing the part of intergenerational mobility which is not caused by the educational expansion. Failing to do so can potentially reverse the relative priority of various policies aiming at reducing the "heritability" of high school degrees and tertiary education diplomas.