Are the Elderly a Threat to Educational Expenditures?

Alejandra Cattaneo and Stefan Wolter
Additional contact information
Alejandra Cattaneo: Socioeconomic Institute, University of Zurich

No 3, Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW)

Abstract: Empirical research has given cause to fear that the demographic ageing in industrialized countries is likely to exert a negative impact on educational spending. These papers have linked the share of the elderly with the per capita or per pupil spending on education at the local, state-wide or national level, trying to control for other exogenous effects. Although this line of research shows in many cases a negative correlation between the shares of elderly people and educational expenditures, a causal link is difficult to prove. This paper uses a unique and representative survey of Swiss voters of all age groups. The analysis shows that elderly people present a clear tendency to be less willing to spend money on education. They would rather prefer to spend public resources on health and social security than on education. Furthermore the paper shows that much of the negative correlation between the shares of elderly and educational spending is the result of the elderly being politically more conservative and in general less inclined to pay for expenditures in the public sector as a whole.

Keywords: public finance; education finance; demographics; survey; Switzerland (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H52 H72 I22 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2007
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-edu and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.business.uzh.ch/RePEc/iso/leadinghouse/0003_lhwpaper.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Are the elderly a threat to educational expenditures? (2009)
Working Paper: Are the Elderly a Threat to Educational Expenditures? (2007)
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:iso:educat:0003

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sara Brunner ().