Education Transition Matrix

[Tamalika Lodh]

I am working with cross-section data and studying intergenerational education mobility. What command/do file in Stata I should use to generate a transition probability matrix for the education of father and son; son in rows and father in columns. Kindly guide. I read about xttrans but the literature says it is applicable to panel data.

[Maarten Buis]

I think your terminology of "education transition matrix" has let you to overthink this. You don't need anything special, as what you want is just standard cross-tabulation. So if the son's education is in the variable educ and the father's education in feduc, then tab educ feduc, col nofreq will do what you want.

Typically I would put the father's education (the origin) on the rows and the son's education (the destination) on columns, but "the nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from".