Crossing the Socio-economic Borders: Opportunities of Intergenerational Wealth Mobility in Egypt

According to Egyptian norms, children stay home till they get married and parents are expected to help financially in costs of their marriages. Hence it is important to study the relation between parent’s social class and their children’s early career social class.
This paper studies inter-generational social mobility from parent’s (root) household to stemmed children’s household with primary focus on wealth mobility as a stable measure of the economic status of households; not affected by fluctuations of income.
The Egyptian Labor Market Survey of 1998 and its panel of 2006 are used. Wealth index for each of the two consequent-generations’ households is constructed using principal components method utilizing information on key characteristics of the housing unit and ownership of assets.
The transition of social mobility is observed in 1998 for the root households and 2006 for the stemmed households using wealth mobility transition matrix. An in-depth analysis is performed to study the relation between the wealth index of stemmed households and their own as well as their parents’ socio-economic characteristics. In order to allow for the relation between parent’s wealth and children’s wealth to differ according to every social level, quantile regression is used at different percentiles of the distribution.