The impact of the growth of the local supply of public
schools in the post-Colonial period on intergenerational
mobility in education is a first-order question in the Arab
World. This question is examined in Jordan using a unique
dataset that links individual data on own schooling and parents’
schooling for adults, from a household survey, with the
supply of schools in the subdistrict of birth at the time the
individual was of age to enroll, from a school census. The
identification strategy exploits the variation in the supply
of basic and secondary public schools across cohorts and
subdistricts of birth in Jordan, controlling for year and
subdistrict-of-birth fixed effects and interactions of governorate
and year-of-birth fixed effects. The findings show
that the local availability of basic public schools does, in
fact, increase intergenerational mobility in education. For
instance, a one standard deviation increase in the supply of
basic public schools per 1,000 people reduces the fatherson
and mother-son associations of schooling by 18–20
percent and the father-daughter and mother-daughter associations
by 33–44 percent. However, an increase in the local
supply of secondary public schools does not seem to have
an effect on the intergenerational mobility in education.