Social Mobility in Germany

We characterize intergenerational mobility in Germany using census data on educational attainment and parental income for 526,000 children. Our measure of educational attainment is the A-Level degree, a requirement for access to university. A 10 percentile increase in the parental income rank is associated with a 5.2 percentage point increase in the A-Level share. This parental income gradient has not changed for the birth cohorts of 1980-1996, despite a large-scale policy of expanding upper secondary education. At the regional level, there exists substantialvariation in mobility estimates. Place effects, rather than sorting of households, account for most of these difference