Income Equality, School Performance and Educational Mobility

Philipp Bauer () and Christoph Schaltegger

CREMA Working Paper Series from Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA)

Abstract: Is income equality a precondition for higher school performance and higher educational mobility? Or is the opposite true? We test empirically whether school performance and intergenerational transmission of educational attainment is depending on income equality on the local level. Using Swiss data, we take advantage of an exogenous variation across 2740 local municipalities. Our results point to a beneficial effect of income inequality on school performance for children with middle educated parents. In contrast, children with poorly educated parents as well as children with highly educated parents perform worse in more unequal communities. However, the popular idea that societies with a more equal income distribution inevitably enhance the upward mobility of disadvantaged children cannot be confirmed.

Keywords: inequality; intergenerational transmission; mobility; educational attainment; income distribution; human capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D30 D31 D63 I2 I21 I30 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.crema-research.ch/papers/2011-03.pdf Full Text (application/pdf)
https://www.crema-research.ch/abstracts/2011-03.htm Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cra:wpaper:2011-03

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CREMA Working Paper Series from Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anna-Lea Werlen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).