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Intergenerational equity by educational attainments in France

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Abstract

This article analyses the development of inequalities across the lifespan and generations in France using a pseudo-panel developed from successive waves of the French Household Expenditure Survey that took place between 1979 and 2011. The standard of living of individuals, evaluated using individualised disposable income or private consumption, including housing costs, is decomposed by sex and educational attainment. Our Age-Period-Cohort models reveal that men with lower education levels who were born after 1950 experienced a significant decline in disposable income compared to those born between 1918 and 1950. Conversely, we observe no decline in disposable income when the whole population of men is considered. The evolution is rather different for women: those with lower education levels did not experience any decline, whereas the overall population of women benefitted from a strong increase in disposable income across generations.

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Notes

  1. As an illustration, Duru-Bellat and Kieffer (2008) computed that the percentage of access to tertiary education rose from 27.7% for the 1962–1967 cohorts to 53.2% for the 1975–1980 cohorts.

  2. Note that we do not follow the recommendations made by the NTA (United Nations, 2013), which suggest to allocate property incomes to the household head only. Since such an allocation would bias our results by gender, we have chosen a more realistic one.

  3. We exclude people aged under 25 and over 84 as they are less representative of their generation in the BdF survey than intermediary age categories. This is because the proportion of these people living in an institution or other household is greater and numbers in the various databases are lower.

  4. For ease of viewing, we have named each age group after its median. Thus the 45–49 age group is named 47.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the special editor of this issue and the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their insightful suggestions and comments. This research was supported by the Agence nationale de la recherche within the JPI MYBL framework (Award No. ANR-16-MYBL-0001-02).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Paris School of Economics and CNRS, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014, Paris, France

    Hippolyte d’Albis

  2. Economix, Université Paris Nanterre, Bâtiment G - Maurice Allais, 200 avenue de la République, 92001, Nanterre Cedex, France

    Ikpidi Badji

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  1. Hippolyte d’Albis
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  2. Ikpidi Badji
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Correspondence to Hippolyte d’Albis.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Table 2 and Figs. 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 and 24.

Table 2 Test for fixed individual effects and Hausman test
Full size table
Fig. 18
figure 18

Disposable income without imputed rents as a function of the date of birth, whole population. Note: Estimates of the cohort effects in a model controlled for the age group and the period. 1946 = 1. Grey lines delimit the confidence interval at 5%

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Fig. 19
figure 19

Private consumption without housing as a function of the date of birth, whole population. Note: Estimates of the cohort effects in a model controlled for the age group and the period. 1946 = 1. Grey lines delimit the confidence interval at 5%

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Fig. 20
figure 20

Disposable income without imputed rents as a function of the date of birth, population without a Baccalauréat. Note: Estimates of the cohort effects in a model controlled for the age group and the period. 1946 = 1. Grey lines delimit the confidence interval at 5%

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Fig. 21
figure 21

Private consumption without housing as a function of the date of birth, population without a Baccalauréat. Note: Estimates of the cohort effects in a model controlled for the age group and the period. 1946 = 1. Grey lines delimit the confidence interval at 5%

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Fig. 22
figure 22

Disposable income without imputed rents as a function of the date of birth, men. Note: Estimates of the cohort effects in a model controlled for the age group and the period. 1946 = 1. Grey lines delimit the confidence interval at 5%

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Fig. 23
figure 23

Disposable income without imputed rents as a function of the date of birth, women. Note: Estimates of the cohort effects in a model controlled for the age group and the period. 1946 = 1. Grey lines delimit the confidence interval at 5%

Full size image
Fig. 24
figure 24

Private consumption without housing as a function of the age group, whole population. Note: Estimates of the age group effects in a model controlled for the cohort and the period. 1946 = 1. Grey lines delimit the confidence interval at 5%

Full size image

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d’Albis, H., Badji, I. Intergenerational equity by educational attainments in France. J Pop Research 38, 339–365 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12546-021-09274-0

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