List of abstracts
9a: "Political economy and public economics of education"

Further Reading: 2006 -

Blankenau, William and Gabriele Camera (2006). A Simple Economic Theory of Skill Accumulation and Schooling Decisions. Review of Economic Dynamics 9 (1): pp. 93-115. [link]

We propose a model that can account for the observed heterogeneiry in productivity and educational attainment.

Boldrin, Michele and Ana Montes (2005). The Intergenerational State, Education and Pensions. Review of Economic Studies 72 (3): pp. 651-64. [link]

When credit markets to finance investment in human capital are missing, the competitive equilibrium allocation is inefficient. When generations overlap, this failure can be mitigated by properly designed social arrangements. We show that public financing of education and public pensions can be designed to implement an intergenerational transfer scheme supporting the complete market allocation. Neither the public financing of education nor the pension scheme we consider resemble standard ones. In our mechanism, via the public education system, the young borrow from the middle aged to invest in human capital. They pay back the debt via a social security tax, the proceedings of which finance pension payments. When the complete market allocation is achieved, the rate of return implicit in this borrowing-lending scheme should equal the market rate of return.

De La Craoix,David , Doepke, Matthias (2009). To Segregate or to Integrate: Education Politics and Democracy. Review of Economic Studies. Volume 76, Issue 2, Pages 597 - 628. [link]

How is the quality of public education affected by the presence of private schools for the rich? Theory and evidence suggest that the link depends crucially on the political system. We develop a theory that integrates private education and fertility decisions with voting on public schooling expenditures. We find that the presence of a large private education sector benefits public schools in a broad-based democracy where politicians are responsive to low-income families but crowds out public education spending in a society that is politically dominated by the rich. The main predictions of the theory are consistent with state-level data and micro data from the U.S. as well as cross-country evidence from the Programme for International Student Assessment study.

Echenique, Federico, Roland G. Fryer and Alex Kaufman (2006). Is School Segregation Good or Bad?. American Economic Review 96 (2): pp. 265-69. [link]

n.a.

Galor, Oded and Omar Moav (2006). Das Human Kapital - A Theory of the Demise of the Class Structure. Review of Economic Studies 73(19): pp. 85-117. [abstract] [link]

This paper suggests that the demise of the capitalists - workers class structure was a socio-economic transformation orchestrated by the capitalists in reaction to the increasing importance of human capital in sustaining their profit rates.

Machin, Stephen (2008). The new economics of education: methods, evidence and policy. Journal of Population Economics Springer, vol. 21(1), pages 1-19, January. [link]

In this paper (my keynote talk from the 2006 ESPE conference), I discuss the recent upsurge in research on the economics of education that has occurred, especially in Europe. I discuss the reasons for the increased interest and present some examples from my recent research in the area. The paper concludes that the increased research interest seems likely to be sustained for some time to come.

Spilimbergo,Antonio (2009). Democracy and Foreign Education. American Economic Review. Vol.99, No.1, pp.528-543. [link]

Despite the large amount of private and public resources spent on foreign education, there is no systematic evidence that foreign-educated individuals foster democracy in their home countries. Using a unique panel dataset on foreign students starting in the 1950s, I show that foreign-educated individuals promote democracy in their home country, but only if the foreign education is acquired in democratic countries. The results are robust to several estimation techniques, to different definitions of democracy, and to the inclusion of a variety of control variables, including democracy in trading partners, neighboring countries, level of income, and level and stock of education. (JEL D72, I21, O15, O17, P26)

List of abstracts 9a: "Political economy and public economics of education"