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To understand the role of family background in intergenerational mobility, a large literature has focused on the conditional mean of children's economic outcomes given parent's economic status, while ignoring the information contained in conditional variance. This paper explores the effects of family background on the conditional variance of children's outcomes in the context of intergenerational educational mobility using data from three large developing countries (China, India, and Indonesia). The empirical analysis uses exceptionally rich data free of sample truncation because of the nonresident children at the time of the survey. Evidence from all three countries suggests a strong influence of father's education on the conditional variance of children's schooling. The analysis finds substantial heterogeneity across countries, gender, and geography (rural/urban). Cohort-based estimates suggest that the effects of father's education on the conditional variance have changed qualitatively; in some cases, a positive effect in the 1950s cohort turns into a substantial negative effect in the 1980s cohort. A methodology is developed to incorporate the effects of family background on the conditional variance along with the standard conditional mean effects. This paper derives risk-adjusted measures of relative and absolute mobility by accounting for an estimate of the risk premium for the conditional variance faced by a child. The estimates of risk-adjusted relative and absolute mobility for China, India, and Indonesia suggest that the existing evidence using the standard measures of mobility substantially underestimates the effects of family background on children's educational opportunities, and thus gives a false impression of high educational mobility. The magnitude of underestimation is especially large for the children born into the most disadvantaged households where fathers have no schooling, while it is negligible for the children of college educated fathers. The standard (but partial) measures may lead to an incorrect ranking of regions and groups in terms of relative mobility. Compared to the risk-adjusted measures, the standard measures are likely to underestimate the gender gap and rural-urban gap in educational opportunities.

Social capital (Sociology)

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December 2000 Governments perform better where there is more general trust and strong civic norms; they perform less well where citizens are less trusting and less civic-minded. Social capital--in the form of general trust and strong civic norms that call for cooperation when large-scale collective action is needed--can improve government performance in three ways: * It can broaden government accountability, making government responsive to citizens at large rather than to narrow interests. * It can facilitate agreement where political preferences are polarized. * It is associated with greater innovation when policymakers face new challenges. Consistent with these arguments, Putnam (1993) has shown that regional governments in the more trusting, more civic-minded northern and central parts of Italy provide public services more effectively than do those in the less trusting, less civic-minded southern regions. Using cross-country data, La Porta and others (1997) and Knack and Keefer (1997) obtained findings consistent with Putnam's evidence. For samples of about 30 nations (represented in the World Value Surveys), they found that societies with greater trust tended to have governments that performed significantly better. The authors used survey measures of citizen confidence in government as well as subjective indicators of bureaucratic inefficiency. Knack further analyzes links between social capital and government performance using data for the United States. In states with more social capital (as measured by an index of trust, volunteering, and census response), government performance is rated higher, based on ratings constructed by the Government Performance Project. This result is highly robust to including a variety of control variables, considering the possibility of influential outlying values, treating the performance ratings as ordinal rather than cardinal, and correcting for possible endogeneity. This paper--a product of Regulation and Competition Policy, Development Research Group--is part of a larger effort in the group to identify the determinants of good governance and of institutions conducive to long-term economic development. The author may be contacted at sknack@worldbank.org.

Social capital (Sociology)

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"This paper explores the social capital impacts of a large-scale, community-driven development project in the Philippines in which communities competed for block grants for infrastructure investment. The analysis uses a unique data set of about 2,100 households collected before the project started (2003) and after one cycle of sub-project implementation (2006) in 66 treatment and 69 matched control communities. Participation in village assemblies, the frequency with which local officials meet with residents and trust towards strangers increased as a result of the project. However, there is a decline in group membership and participation in informal collective action activities. This may have been because households were time-constrained, so that in order to participate in project activities, they needed to temporarily reduce their participation in informal activities. An alternative explanation is that the project improved the efficiency of formal forms of social capital and thus households needed to rely less on informal forms. Finally, the results indicate that, in the short run, the project might have reduced the number of other investments. "--World Bank web site.

Community development --- Social capital (Sociology)

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Violence --- Social capital (Sociology) --- Economic aspects

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Happiness --- Social capital (Sociology) --- Social networks --- Trust