INTERGENERATIONAL EDUCATIONAL MOBILITY - EFFECTS OF FAMILY AND STATE IN MALAYSIA

In this paper we 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 us 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, we 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, we are able to introduce time-varying covariates to measure the family's economic circumstances, the quality of its environment, and the composition of the sibset at the time a given decision is made.