Family background, gender and schooling in Mexico

This article is organised around two enquiries concerning the determinants of schooling attainment in Mexico. The first explores the importance of parental schooling for children's educational attainment, which is a near‐universal finding in the literature. Even after controlling for usually unobserved family characteristics such as desired schooling, parental schooling continues to exert a strong influence on children's attainment. The second enquiry examines differences in determinants of schooling for boys and girls. Schooling attainment for boys appears to be more sensitive to their number of siblings, household wealth and parent's desired schooling. Girls’ schooling depends relatively more on birth order and family structure.