The Evolution of Education: A Macroeconomic Analysis

Diego Restuccia and Guillaume Vandenbroucke

Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics

Abstract: Between 1940 and 2000 there has been a substantial increase of educational attainment in the United States. What caused this trend? We develop a model of human capital accumulation that features a non-degenerate distribution of educational attainment in the population. We use this framework to assess the quantitative contribution of technological progress and changes in life expectancy in explaining the evolution of educational attainment. The model implies an increase in average years of schooling of 24 percent which is the increase observed in the data. We find that technological variables and in particular skill-biased technical change represent the most important factors in accounting for the increase in educational attainment. The strong response of schooling to changes in income is informative about the potential role of educational policy and the impact of other trends affecting lifetime income.

Keywords: educational attainment; schooling; skill-biased technical progress; human capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E1 O3 O4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: Unknown pages
Date: 2012-03-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-edu, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/public/workingPapers/tecipa-446.pdf Main Text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: THE EVOLUTION OF EDUCATION: A MACROECONOMIC ANALYSIS (2013)
Working Paper: The Evolution of Education: A Macroeconomic Analysis (2012)
Working Paper: The Evolution of Education: A Macroeconomic Analysis (2010)
Working Paper: The Evolution of Education: A Macroeconomic Analysis (2008)
Working Paper: The Evolution of Education: A Macroeconomic Analysis (2008)
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:tor:tecipa:tecipa-446

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics 150 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RePEc Maintainer ().