Compulsory education, life trajectories, and intergenerational mobility: evidence from Mexico’s 1993 schooling reform

Abstract

• Mexico’s 1993 reform raised educational attainment; effects were three times larger for Indigenous than the national average. • Using a regression discontinuity design, the paper identifies causal effects of schooling across multiple life domains. • Schooling reduced fertility, child mortality, and reallocated workers from agriculture to higher-productivity sectors. • Parental schooling raised children’s enrolment, showing strong intergenerational spillovers. • Findings demonstrate how compulsory schooling reforms can narrow structural disparities in unequal middle-income countries. Mexico’s 1993 reform extended compulsory schooling from six to nine years, creating a birth-cohort discontinuity in educational exposure. This paper exploits that discontinuity to identify the causal effects of schooling expansion across the life course. Using a regression discontinuity and instrumental variable strategy applied to the 2020 Mexican Census, it traces the reform’s consequences from educational attainment through fertility, child mortality, labour market participation, and geographic mobility, and into the schooling outcomes of the next generation. The reform raised educational attainment across all groups, but its effects were concentrated among Indigenous communities and rural populations, where baseline attainment was lowest and barriers to secondary schooling were greatest. For Indigenous individuals, literacy rates increased by 4.5 percentage points and lower-secondary completion by 3.8 percentage points, from baselines of 78 and 29 per cent respectively. These gains translated into lower fertility, reduced child mortality, higher employment, and a reallocation of workers out of low-productivity agriculture into higher-productivity sectors. Using census household identifiers to link parents to children, the analysis further finds that an additional year of parental schooling raised the probability of children’s secondary school enrolment by 3 to 4 percentage points and upper-secondary enrolment by 5 to 8 percentage points. Together, the results show that a single compulsory schooling reform generated a sustained, multi-domain shift in life trajectories that extended across generations.