We exploit the changes in the distribution of family income to estimate the effect of parental resources on college education. Our strategy exploits the fact that families at the bottom of the income distribution were much poorer in the 1990s than they were in the 1970s, while the opposite is true for families in the top quartile of the distribution. Our estimates suggest large effects of family income on enrollments. For example, we find that a 10 percent increase in family income is associated with a 1.4 percent increase in the probability of attending a four-year college.
This paper studies the effects of progressive income taxes and education finance in a dynamic heterogeneous-agent economy. Such redistributive policies entail distortions to labor supply and savings, but also serve as partial substitutes for missing credit and insurance markets. The resulting tradeoffs for growth and efficiency are explored, both theoretically and quantitatively, in a model that yields complete analytical solutions. Progressive education finance always leads to higher income growth than taxes and transfers, but at the cost of lower insurance. Overall efficiency is assessed using a new measure that properly reflects aggregate resources and idiosyncratic risks but, unlike a standard social welfare function, does not reward equality per se, Simulations using empirical parameter estimates show that the efficiency costs and benefits of redistribution are generally of the same order of magnitude, resulting in plausible values for the optimal rates. Aggregate income and aggregate welfare provide only crude lower and upper bounds around the true efficiency tradeoff.
This paper presents empirical evidence on how education is related to income distribution in a panel data set covering a broad range of countries for the period between 1960 and 1990. The findings indicate that educational factors-higher educational attainment and more equal distribution of education-play a significant role in making income distribution more equal. The results also confirm the Kuznets inverted-U curve for the relationship between income level and income inequality. We also find that government social expenditure contributes to more equal distribution of income. However, a significant proportion of cross-country variation in income inequality remains unexplained.
We develop a new theoretical link between inequality and growth. In our model, fertility and education decisions are interdependent. Poor parents decide to have many children and invest little in education. A mean-preserving spread in the income distribution increases the fertility differential between the rich and the poor, which implies that more weight gets placed on families who provide little education. Consequently, an increase in inequality lowers average education and, therefore, growth. We find that this fertility-differential effect accounts for most of the empirical relationship between inequality and growth.
Many social commentators have raised concerns over the possibility that increased sorting in society may lead to greater inequality. To investigate this, we construct a dynamic model of intergenerational education acquisition, fertility, and marital sorting and parameterize the steady state to match several basic empirical findings. We find that increased sorting will significantly increase income inequality. Four factors are important to our findings: a negative correlation between fertility and education, a decreasing marginal effect of parental education on children's years of education, wages that are sensitive to the relative supply of skilled workers, and borrowing constraints that affect educational attainment for some low-income households.
Public education contributes to growth not only by building human capital but also by instilling common norms that increase social cohesion. This is modeled in the context of a political economy framework in which social cohesion reduces wasteful rent seeking, and thus strengthens incentives for investment in human captial. The political decisions that determine whether different social groups retain separate schooling systems, or adopt atl integrated system, weigh these material advantages against the psychic cost to parents of alienating their children from traditional values. This aspect of public education helps explain why, commonly, education is publicly administered as well as publicly financed.
This paper o.ers an explanation for observed di.erences across countries in educational policies and in resulting interpersonal distributions of human capital. We analyse a generalequilibrium model in which, as a result of the apportionment of natural ability, nurturing, and publicly .nanced education, some people can be well endowed with human capital, whereas other people are poorly endowed with human capital. We assume that people can choose to be either producers or predators. Because an increase in a person’s human capital makes predation a less attractive choice for that person, it is possible that by using some of their human capital to educate the poorly endowed people the well endowed people can increase their own consumption. More interestingly, our theory predicts that, if producers are able to enforce a collective choice that takes advantage of the deterrent e.ect of allocating resources to guarding against predators, then the well endowed people prefer a relatively egalitarian educational policy that increases the human capital of all of the poorly endowed people. Such an educational policy either decreases the cost of deterring predation or makes deterrence possible. In contrast, if producers or small subsets of producers individually choose the amount of their resources to allocate to guarding, taking the ratio of predators to producers as given, then the well endowed people prefer an elitist educational policy that, if it has a redistributional component, decreases the number of poorly endowed people, thereby decreasing the number of predators, without increasing the human capital of the remaining poorly endowed people. These implications seem to be consistent with the facts about di.erences across countries in educational policy.
Direct measures of labor-force quality from international mathematics and science test scores are strongly related to growth. Indirect specification tests are generally consistent with a causal link: direct spending on schools is unrelated to student performance differences; the estimated growth effects of improved labor-force quality hold when East Asian countries are excluded; and, finally, home-country quality differences of immigrants are directly related to U.S. earnings if the immigrants are educated in their own country but not in the United States. The last estimates of micro productivity effects, however, introduce uncertainty about the magnitude of the growth effects.
Educational subsidies are frequently justified as a method of altering the income distribution. It is thus natural to compare education to other tax-transfer schemes designed to achieve distributional objectives. While equity-efficiency trade-offs are frequently discussed, they are rarely explicitly treated. This paper creates a general equilibrium model of school attendance, labor supply, wage determination, and aggregate production, which is used to compare alternative redistribution devices in terms of both deadweight loss and distributional outcomes. A wage subsidy generally dominates tuition subsidies across a wide range of fundamental parameters for the economy. Both are generally superior to a negative income tax. With externalities in production, however, there is an unambiguous role for governmental subsidy of education, because it both raises GDP and creates a more equal income distribution.
Using a cross section of countries, this paper empirically examines whether devoting more resources to education can positively affect the distribution of income (as measured by the Gini coefficient) within a country. From the findings, public education expenditures appear to be associated with a subsequent decrease in the level of income inequality. This finding is robust to the inclusion of various control variables and appears to be larger in high income nations. The findings suggest that devoting more resources to education may be one way to reduce the level of income inequality within a country.
Estimates of the effect of education on GDP (the social return to education) have been hard to reconcile with micro-evidence on the private return. We present a simple explanation that combines two ideas: imperfect substitution between worker types and endogenous skill-biased technological progress. When types of workers are imperfect substitutes, the supply of human capital is negatively related to its return, and a higher education level compresses wage differentials. We use cross-country panel data on income inequality to estimate the private return and GDP data to estimate the social return. The results show that the private return falls by 1.5 percentage points when the average education level increases by a year, which is consistent with Katz and Murphy's [1992] estimate of the elasticity of substitution between worker types. We find no evidence for dynamics in the private return, and certainly not for a reversal of the negative effect as described in Acemoglu [2002]. The short-run social return equals the private return, but the long-run return is two times higher, providing evidence in favour of endogenous technological progress. The rise in education is the major cause of productivity growth over the sample period 1960-90.
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