Household Recombination, Retrospective Evaluation, and Educational Mobility over 40 Years

Despite longstanding belief in certain circles that investment in primary health care and education can help to encourage reductions in inequality and increases in intergenerational economic mobility, evidence is scarce due to the lack of systematically collected data from developing countries that links households over multiple decades. Bangladesh would seem an especially fruitful avenue for looking at these issues given international recognition of its success in improving basic health care. In this paper we use a newly collected survey data connected to the Matlab Demographic Surveillance System (DSS) maintained by the International Center for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Bangladesh (ICDDRB) to take a first look at this issue. A novel insight from this paper is that standard methods for correcting sampling weights in panel data do not adequately account for the process of household formation and dissolution.We develop a new approach to weighting that requires the kind of information available in the context of a DSS, and use these weights to look at long term changes in educational investment of households in the Matlab area. We show that a substantial rise in average educational investment among children 6-16 has been accompanied by high levels of economic mobility but little reduction in economic inequality.