ABSTRACT The diverging destinies hypothesis predicts that educational inequality increases in contemporary societies because parents with higher levels of education postpone the birth of their children. This hypothesis is supported by empirical evidence demonstrating that advanced parental ages improve children’s educational outcomes. However, the consequences of socioeconomic differences in parental ages for the intergenerational transmission of education also depend on whether the associations between parental ages and child education vary by parental education. To test this hypothesis, we use data from three countries representing different welfare regimes: Germany, Norway, and the United States. In all three countries, children’s educational attainment at the secondary school level increases with higher parental ages more in families with low than in families with highly educated parents. In other words, the intergenerational transmission of education is stronger for younger than for older parents. Consequently, our findings nuance the diverging destinies hypothesis by demonstrating that increasing parental ages in socioeconomically disadvantaged families increases educational mobility more than decreasing parental ages in socioeconomically advantaged families. These findings are qualitatively the same in all three countries, suggesting that diverging destinies also occur in countries outside the United States.

ABSTRACT This study estimates the effects of women's education on their offspring using quasi-experimental evidence from six educational reforms that increased the length of compulsory schooling in several European countries. The empirical analysis uses data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe and instrumental variable estimation to estimate the effects of female education on fertility and on children's education. This study provides the first analysis using quasi-experimental variation in education to estimate prospective models of intergenerational effects. These models start with a birth cohort and link information on their fertility and on their children's outcomes. These models account for the effect of female education on the probability that women have children when estimating the effect of female education. The direct effect of female education on children's educational attainment, i.e. the effect conditional on the birth of a child, is positive. In addition, higher female education increases fertility. Therefore, the probability that a woman has a child with a high educational attainment is increased when considering the effect of female education on fertility. Studies that estimate retrospective models of intergenerational effects using reforms in the length of compulsory schooling may underestimate the total effect of female on child education.