Center for Effective Global Action

Cognitive skills contribute to human capital and economic growth, yet little is known about how they transmit across generations or evolve over the life course in low-income settings. Previous research on intergenerational cognitive transmission has focused predominantly on Western, high-income countries, leaving open whether those patterns generalize to low-income country settings as well. Leveraging repeated Raven’s scores, a measurement of fluid intelligence, spanning 25 years in the Kenya Life Panel Survey (KLPS), from adolescence to midlife along with data on respondents’ children, we investigate the intergenerational transmission and stability of cognitive skills. First, the intergenerational transmission of cognitive skills from parents to children is low–and lower than in higher- income countries or than predicted by expert forecasts. Second, the low correlation cannot be explained by measurement error or cognitive instability. Intraindividual rank-order stability is high over both short and long horizons. Third, regression analyses and machine learning suggest that environmental factors, which are prone to differ in low-income settings, moderate some of the transmission. Together, these findings suggest that the intergenerational transmission of cognitive skills is weaker in low-income contexts than previously assumed–and that environmental factors prevalent in those settings, rather than low data quality, are a likely explanation.