Parental Schooling, Educational Attainment, Skills, and Earnings: A Trend Analysis across Fifteen Countries

Using data on fifteen countries based on the harmonization of IALS and PIAC data, we provide a cross-national analysis of the evolution of the role of educational attainment and cognitive skills as mediators of intergenerational inequalities between 1994 and 2015. We find that the association between parents’ education and children’s earnings is large and highly stable over time in most countries, except for Scandinavian countries, where we detect a downward trend. Conversely, the United States stands out as the country displaying the largest earning differentials by parents’ education and as the only country where these differentials increased over time. We demonstrate that educational attainment and skills contributed in different ways to the persistence of these intergenerational inequalities. On the one hand, educational equalization was compensated by increasing earning returns to education in several countries. On the other hand, the association between parents’ education and cognitive skills, as well as the related earning returns, stayed largely unchanged across these two decades.