Intergenerational effects of shifts in women’s educational distribution in South Korea: Transmission, differential fertility, and assortative mating

Abstract

This study examines the intergenerational effects of changes in women's education in South Korea. We define intergenerational effects as changes in the distribution of educational attainment in an offspring generation associated with the changes in a parental generation. Departing from the previous approach in research on social mobility that has focused on intergenerational association, we examine the changes in the distribution of educational attainment across generations. Using a simulation method based on Mare and Maralani's recursive population renewal model, we examine how intergenerational transmission, assortative mating, and differential fertility influence intergenerational effects. The results point to the following conclusions. First, we find a positive intergenerational effect: improvement in women's education leads to improvement in daughter's education. Second, we find that the magnitude of intergenerational effects substantially depends on assortative marriage and differential fertility: assortative mating amplifies and differential fertility dampens the intergenerational effects. Third, intergenerational effects become bigger for the less educated and smaller for the better educated over time, which is a consequence of educational expansion. We compare our results with Mare and Maralani's original Indonesian study to illustrate how the model of intergenerational effects works in different socioeconomic circumstances.

Education, Elderly Health, and Differential Population Aging in South Korea: A Demographic Approach

“…This demographic approach first appeared in Mare and Maralani (2006), which examined the intergenerational effect of education in Indonesia. Subsequent research applied this approach to different societal contexts (e.g., Choi and Mare 2010;Kye and Mare 2012;Maralani 2013). The current study extends this approach to studying implications of educational differentials in elderly health on population aging.…”

“…By contrast, in the final model (M_F_T), changes in women's education are assumed to lead to changes in all intervening demographic variables. Formally, we modify , , and in the equation (1) in Section 6.1 to capture different assumptions (see Kye andMare 2012: 1499). To illustrate how the different simulations work, let us think of the first scenario, redistribution of five percent women from the lowest (zero) to the highest (12+ years) education category.…”

Growing educational differentials in the retreat from marriage among Korean men

“…However, the explanation of changing effects of men's education on marriage, which focuses on changing economic values of men's education in labor market, can be complemented by simultaneously looking at what has happened among women. As described above, education expansion in Korea during the last decades among women has been as substantial as among men, considerably narrowing the gender gap in the share of college-educated population (Park 2007b; also see Kye and Mare 2012). This trend of increasing women's education has likely changed the pool of women for marriage of men with the lowest level of education.…”

Social Components of the Obesity Epidemic

“…Interestingly, when both parents' had long-term overweight (BMI≥25 kg m 2 ), before pregnancy and after 16-year follow-up, the children had higher risk of overweight, indicating an intergenerational transmission of obesity [15]. Other studies have also correlated pre-marital BMI, assortative marriage with the intergenerational effect on obesity [16,17].…”