Volume 71, Issue 1 e12710
ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Using machine learning to unveil the predictors of intergenerational mobility

Luís Clemente-Casinhas

Corresponding Author

Luís Clemente-Casinhas

Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL) and Business Research Unit (BRU-IUL)

Correspondence to: Luís Clemente-Casinhas, Avenida das Forças Armadas, 1649-026, Lisboa, Portugal ([email protected]).

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Alexandra Ferreira-Lopes

Alexandra Ferreira-Lopes

Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL) and Business Research Unit (BRU-IUL)

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Luís Filipe Martins

Luís Filipe Martins

Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Business Research Unit (BRU-IUL), and CIMS-University of Surrey

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First published: 30 August 2024

Note: We express gratitude to three referees and an editor for helpful contributions. We also thank Ambar Narayan, Daniel Mahler, and João Moura for their valuable help. We extend our appreciation to the participants of the 44th Meeting of the Association of Southern European Economic Theorists for their comments. We acknowledge financial support from FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (National Science and Technology Foundation) through grants 2020.04449.BD (DOI: 10.54499/2020.04449.BD) and UIDB/00315/2020 (DOI: 10.54499/UIDB/00315/2020).

Abstract

We assess the predictors of intergenerational mobility in income and education for a sample of 137 countries, between 1960 and 2018, using the World Bank's Global Database on Intergenerational Mobility (GDIM). The Rigorous LASSO and the Random Forest and Gradient Boosting algorithms are considered, to avoid the consequences of an ad-hoc model selection in our high dimensionality context. We obtain variable importance plots and analyze the relationships between mobility and its predictors through Shapley values. Results show that intergenerational income mobility is expected to be positively predicted by the parental average education, the share of married individuals and negatively predicted by the share of children that have completed less than primary education, the growth rate of population density, and inequality. Mobility in education is expected to have a positive relationship with the adult literacy, government expenditures on primary education, and the stock of migrants. The unemployment and poverty rates matter for income mobility, although the direction of their relationship is not clear. The same occurs for education mobility and the growth rate of real GDP per capita, the degree of urbanization, the share of female population, and income mobility. Income mobility is found to be greater for the 1960s cohort. Countries belonging to the Latin America and Caribbean region present lower mobility in income and education. We find a positive relationship between predicted income mobility and observed mobility in education.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The data supporting the findings of this study are available upon request.

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