Sense in sociability? Maternal education, social capital and child schooling in rural Bangladesh

Using detailed micro-data on social relations and networks from rural Bangladesh, this paper examines the social determinants of children's schooling in a developing country. We employ a comprehensive set of controls for parental sociability and NGO membership as proxies for family social capital. We find no evidence that parental sociability bolsters child outcomes as inputs in the educational production function or indirectly via boosting maternal social knowledge, which is an important predictor of children's educational status. On the other hand, the effect of maternal social knowledge prevails even when we additionally control for neighbourhood-level unobservables and maximum education level of the household. To be precise, we find no evidence to suggest that ‘social’ parents are ‘better’ parents: social knowledge endowment of mothers is not related to their sociability. Rather, educated parents and those with higher unobserved taste for child quality have better social knowledge irrespective of their sociability.