A Simple Economic Theory of Skill Accumulation and Schooling Decisions

We propose a model of schooling that can account for the observed heterogeneity in workers’ productivity and educational attainment. Identical unskilled agents can get a degree at a cost, but becoming skilled entails an additional unobservable effort cost. Individual labor can then be used as an input in pairwise production matches. Two factors affect students’ desire to build human capital: degrees imperfectly signal productivity, and contract imperfections generate holdup problems. Multiple stationary equilibria exist, some of which are market failures characterized by a largely educated workforce of low average skill. Policy implications are explored

Government education expenditures in early and late childhood

Human capital investment in early childhood can lead to large and persistent gains. Beyond this window of opportunity, human capital accumulation is more costly. Despite compelling evidence in support of this notion, government education spending is allocated disproportionately toward late childhood and young adulthood. We consider the consequences of a reallocation using an overlapping generations model with private and public spending on early and late childhood education. Taking as given the higher returns to early childhood investment, we find that the current allocation may nonetheless be appropriate. When we consider a homogeneous population, this can hold for moderate levels of government spending. With heterogeneity, this can hold for middle income workers. Lower income workers, by contrast, may benefit from a reallocation

Public Spending on Education and the Incentives for Student Achievement

We build a model where homogeneous workers can accumulate human capital by investing in education. Schools combine public resources and individual effort to generate productive skills. If skills are imperfectly compensated, then in equilibrium students may under-invest in effort. We examine the effect on human capital accumulation of three basic education finance policies. Increased tuition subsidies may not be beneficial because they increase enrollment but they may lower the incentives for student achievement, hence the skill level. Policies directed at enhancing the productivity of education or making degrees more informative are more successful at improving educational outcomes

The Relationship Between Education Finance Reform and Tax and Expenditure Limitations

Since the success of Serrano v. Priest in California, at least 43 states have experienced legal challenges to their education financing formulas and in 19 states court rulings have forced changes in these formulas. A result of this litigation is a transfer of resources from districts with higher property tax values to those with lower property tax values. Over roughly the same time span, more than 30 states have imposed new restrictions limiting tax collections, tax expenditures or both (TELs) at the local level. There is evidence that the effect of education finance reform depends upon whether a TEL is in place. Thus to understand fully the impact of such litigation, one must consider whether reform makes the passage of a TEL more likely. In this paper we use data for all states in which referenda are possible over the 1978 – 1990 period to investigate whether TEL referendums are more likely to pass in states where courts have ordered education finance reform. We find that the probability of TEL success in a statewide election is significantly higher if the state has experienced education finance reform

Industry estimates of the elasticity of substitution and the rate of biased technological change between skilled and unskilled labour

We estimate the elasticity of substitution between skilled and unskilled labour and the pace of skill-biased technological change at the industry level. The data is compiled from the March extract of the Current Population Survey (CPS) from 1968 to 2006. Industry information provided by the survey is used to group workers into 13 industry categories and education levels are used to dichotomize workers as skilled or unskilled. We construct measures of the ratio of skilled to unskilled employment and the ratio of skilled to unskilled wages in each industry. Using a relationship implied by profit maximizing behaviour on the part of representative firms, this data generates estimates of structural parameters. We find considerable differences across industries in the elasticity of substitution between skilled and unskilled labour. Furthermore, while most industries have experienced skill-biased technological change, the pace of this change has varied widely across industries.