PONE-D-23-22533Intergenerational Education Mobility: Does Education and Gender Equality Matter?PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Duong,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

The reviewers have provided valuable feedback, highlighting the need for a more rigorous clarification and substantiation of your findings, particularly regarding the technical soundness and data support for your conclusions. On a positive note, they commend the appropriateness of your statistical analysis and data availability, as well as the clear use of standard English.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Feb 02 2024 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Rafi Amir-ud-Din

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

2. When completing the data availability statement of the submission form, you indicated that you will make your data available on acceptance. We strongly recommend all authors decide on a data sharing plan before acceptance, as the process can be lengthy and hold up publication timelines. Please note that, though access restrictions are acceptable now, your entire data will need to be made freely accessible if your manuscript is accepted for publication. This policy applies to all data except where public deposition would breach compliance with the protocol approved by your research ethics board. If you are unable to adhere to our open data policy, please kindly revise your statement to explain your reasoning and we will seek the editor's input on an exemption. Please be assured that, once you have provided your new statement, the assessment of your exemption will not hold up the peer review process.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: I Don't Know

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors have analyzed the relationship between education and gender inequality and intergenerational mobility using data from the Global Database on Intergenerational Mobility for 153 countries and cohorts born between the 1940s and 1980s. The paper specifically looks at two questions: first, whether education expansion policies mitigate the negative impacts of education inequality and parental influence on upward mobility; and second, whether gender inequality affect upward intergenerational mobility.

The authors have taken a painstakingly long exercise to answer questions which seem to have been thoroughly studied in literature and have been concretely established by multiple empirical studies. In other words, the research gaps this paper tries to fill are not clear. The authors also do not clarify how an analysis using the cohorts from 1940 to 1980 provides significant learnings for today’s policy and practice.

Some specific comments are below:

• The introduction is broken in two parts to justify the two research questions. Authors touch upon Great Gatsby Curve, importance of education, welfare-regime of the state, among the other predictors of inter-generational mobility, but the research question framed is limited only to education expansion policies given the inequality and parental dependency – even when authors cite other literature which investigate these relations. The literature cited do not justify the question framed.

• The second part of the introduction is supposedly about gender inequality. But line 68 – 76 mention other studies that study inequality.

• In line 91: Authors mention that there is a research gap regarding understanding gender inequalities that emanate from cultural and social norms. This is an incorrect assumption as there have been plethora of research now on understanding the multi-dimensionality of gender as well as its fluidity. Authors go on to cite evidence of multidimensional impact of gender but frame the research question without any mention of the same.

• Data and methods:

o The authors do not justify why they use education as an indicator for mobility and not income or wealth like many of the literature they cite.

o The indicator construction overall is unclear in the article.

o Education expansion does not necessarily reflect education policy, but authors use them interchangeably without justification.

o The last cohort of the Global Database on Intergenerational Mobility is 1980 whereas, authors include indicators of region and ‘fragility’ from a 2020 database. Other than the simple confirmation that the indicators of interest vary significantly by these country types, there is no concrete justification as to how a 2020 classification of countries apply to a 1980 cohort when there has been significant overhaul of policies both internally and globally.

o Authors talk about intergenerational mobility in terms of education without much justification. How does the probability of a child surpassing their parent's educational category, given that the parent does not have tertiary education reflect “expansion policies”? It can also reflect changes in country’s overall economic structure – and therefore, marginal propensity to consume.

o For both q1 and q2 models, there is no clarity on what the control variables are other than the indicators of interest. For any model on education, a number of predictors from both supply and demand side should be controlled for. Authors need to justify if no other controls are added.

o Authors note the contradictory results (Line 387-389: maternal education is strongly associated with immobility; but children are less dependent on their mother's education) but do not explain, interpret or discuss these findings at all.

o Authors make large assumptions based on country/region effects without clarifying or justifying these assumptions. If region specific results vary from overall results, are these results robust?

• The results dominate the write-up and discussion section does not go into interpretation of the results or try to place hypotheses from the counter-intuitive results. The methodology section also does not justify why the machine learning techniques were required or why a violin plot was needed to describe the data.

• Overall, the paper is poorly structured with no clear distinction between methodology, results, discussion, and conclusion. The results are also not placed in the larger context to clarify what this article is adding to a very old discussion.

Other than these, authors need to use consistent language, not use "females" when analyzing gender but use "women" and follow the structure of a scientific article.

The manuscript needs to be thoroughly read and restructured before it can be published.

Reviewer #2: This study used data from the Global Database on Intergenerational Mobility for 153 countries and those born between the 1940s and 1980s to examine the relationship between education and gender inequality on one hand, and intergenerational mobility on the other.

The aim was to:

1. Assess the effectiveness of education policies in promoting upward mobility

2. Investigate the direct and indirect effects of gender inequality on mobility outcomes.

The study found intricate interconnections among significant factors, such as educational expansion, educational inequality, and parental dependency, as they collectively shape mobility outcomes.

Even though what the study found is not so novel and we already know these, the author need to take time to reorganize the sections to make them more clearer and be more targeted in the recommendations. I have therefore suggested some actions below in this direction.

Analysis

1. With regards to your analysis, could you pull out the data on one or two countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and show how they contradict the East Asian and European countries? It will be good to se that analysis as shown for India, China, Denmark and the others.

Recommendations

2. Please unpick your recommendations and show them distinctively. For example:

- At which level of education would this investment you call for be made? Would grater educational investment be required at the basic, primary, pre-tertiary or at the tertiary levels? And please note, these must bring maximum impact.

3. The greater obstacles women face in achieving upward mobility should be addressed with which measures?

4. Is it only high educational levels that promote upward mobility? How about income levels of parents? And places such as India, how about extended family support systems that tend to enable people’s social mobility.

**********

6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: Yes: Ruchira Bhattacharya

Reviewer #2: No

**********

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

What Really Matters for Global Intergenerational Mobility?

PONE-D-23-22533R1

Dear Dr. Duong,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. If you have any questions relating to publication charges, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Rafi Amir-ud-Din

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

**********

2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Partly

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: No

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

Reviewer #3: Dear Authors

This is a good work in terms of looking at the mobility and education relationship. I will recommend incorporating literature on integration of global markets to enhance the relevance of your study. Please refer to the following studies:

Gupta and Guidi (29012) Cointegration relationship and time varying co-movements among Indian and Asian developed stock markets

Guidi and Gupta (2013) Market efficiency in the ASEAN region: evidence from multivariate and cointegration tests

Beakert and Harvey (1995) Time-Varying World Market Integration

Since market integration has a bearing on inter generational mobility, it will benefit from providing a context here. However, I do realise that your study does not look at the mobility aacross nations but integration of markets provide important signal within the domestic context as well and the transmission of economic growth across countries.

Hope this helps

**********

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

**********