EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Economic uncertainty, households’ credit situations, and higher education

Niraj P. Koirala, Dhiroj Prasad Koirala, Linus Nyiwul and Zhining Hu

Journal of Macroeconomics, 2024, vol. 80, issue C

Abstract: In this paper, we study the relationship between economic uncertainty, households’ credit situations, and educational outcomes. Using the System Generalized Methods of Moments (SYS-GMM) on educational and economic data from the World Bank and IMF, we find that economic uncertainty and households’ access to credit have positive impacts on higher education. Further analyses suggest that economic uncertainty and households’ access to credit have heterogeneous effects on educational outcomes at the tertiary level, by gender and development status. Specifically, we find that economic uncertainties expand enrollments in developed countries and contract them in developing economies. In addition, access to credit has a more pronounced positive impact on educational outcomes in developing nations compared to developed ones. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that household credit coupled with economic uncertainty decreases women’s educational outcomes in higher education, posing a serious threat to gender equality in higher education. Lastly, we find that monetary policy appears to play a role in these results. These findings remain robust to alternative proxies of economic uncertainty and approach such as the Instrumental Variable (IV) regression method, which uses a political database on government changes and ideological gaps between cabinets as instruments. In general, the findings emphasize the enduring influence of economic uncertainties, typically associated with business cycles, on long-term aspects such as education.

Keywords: Economic uncertainty; Higher education enrollments; Households’ financial situation; Monetary policy; IV regression; SYS-GMM (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E43 G51 I20 I21 I23 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0164070424000132
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:jmacro:v:80:y:2024:i:c:s0164070424000132

DOI: 10.1016/j.jmacro.2024.103598

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Macroeconomics is currently edited by Douglas McMillin and Theodore Palivos

More articles in Journal of Macroeconomics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-24
Handle: RePEc:eee:jmacro:v:80:y:2024:i:c:s0164070424000132