Intergenerational Educational Mobility in Poland in the Long Run: Education as a Positional Good

ABSTRACT

We investigate the evolution of intergenerational educational mobility in Poland since 1920. We use a novel empirical method allowing for the measurement of mobility at a constant rank in the education distribution, not among education levels. This paper finds that intergenerational mobility increased after WWII. This increase was only temporary. When the new social system stabilized, intergenerational mobility decreased. The transition to a free market economy decreased intergenerational mobility but it recovered after the first 15 years of the transition. Despite these identified fluctuations, intergenerational mobility has been rather stable over time

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• intergenerational educational mobility
• Poland
• social mobility
• socialism
• transition

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J62
• N34
• I24

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I am grateful to the editor, who handled the submission and anonymous reviewer for insightful comments. I am also thankful to the participants of the conferences of Japan Economic Policy Association and Italian Association of Labor Economics, where paper was presented and discussed.

2. The usage of programs developed by Paul Novosad and posted online at https://github.com/paulnov/anr-bounds is acknowledged. We thank Paul Novosad for sharing his programs in an online repository.

3. It’s not a suprise beacuse only 5% of students have been admitted on the basis of bonus points.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marcin Wroński

Marcin Wroński is the assistant professor at the Collegium of World Economy of the SGH Warsaw School of Economics. He is a fellow of the World Inequality Database, Global Labor Organization, and CERGE-EI Foundation.