Grade inflation, social background, and labour market matching

Robert Schwager

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2012, vol. 82, issue 1, 56-66

Abstract: A model is presented where workers of differing abilities and from different social backgrounds are assigned to jobs based on grades received at school. It is examined how this matching is affected if good grades are granted to some low-ability students. Such grade inflation is shown to reduce the aggregate wage of the lower class workers because employers use social origin as a signal for productivity if grades are less than fully informative. Moreover, the high-ability students from the higher class may benefit from grade inflation since this shields them from the competition on the part of able students from the lower classes.

Keywords: Education; Grading; Standards; Assignment; Social mobility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 I21 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268111003131
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:jeborg:v:82:y:2012:i:1:p:56-66

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2011.12.012

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().