Educational Policies and Income Inequality

Daniele Checchi and Herman G. van de Werfhorst ()
Additional contact information
Herman G. van de Werfhorst: University of Amsterdam

No 8222, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: In this paper we study the associations between educational policies, distributions of educational attainments and income distributions. By matching inequality measures on test scores, years of education and labour earnings by country, birth cohorts and gender, we show that inequality in education (measured both at quality and quantity levels) affect earnings inequality. We then consider potential endogeneity of educational distributions and we resort to instrumental estimation using information on government reforming activity in the field of education. By controlling for country-specific and time fixed effects, and by separating age and cohorts effects, we prove that educational inequality respond to educational reforms, identifying educational policies (like later entry into compulsory education or introduction of standardised tests) capable to reduce income inequalities thirty years later.

Keywords: earnings inequality; test score; educational inequality; educational policies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2014-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-edu and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published - published in Socio-Economic Review, 2018, 16 (1), 137 - 160

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp8222.pdf (application/pdf)

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:iza:izadps:dp8222

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().