Brown Bag Seminar: Andreu Arenas

Countercyclical Schooling and Intergenerational Mobility

Andreu ARENAS, CORE, Université catholique de Louvain

(Joint with Clément Malgouyres, Banque de France)

We study how economic conditions at the time of choosing post-compulsory education affect schooling attainment by parental background, and how such changes translate into occupational intergenerational mobility. Exploiting variation in the unemployment rate in individuals' départment of birth at age 16 across 96 French départments and 22 cohorts, we find that cohorts deciding on post-compulsory education in bad economic times are more educationally mobile.  We find that this pays off in the labor market, since these cohorts are also more occupationally  mobile, and that a large fraction of this difference in occupational mobility is explained by differences in educational attainment.