Education as a social agreement

Thomas Bassetti

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2012, vol. 41, issue 1, 8-17

Abstract: This article shows that the main hypotheses used in the economic literature to explain the existence of low-skill traps are not necessary. In particular, if we relax two strong assumptions, those of perfect information in the labor market and individual homogeneity, less-developed countries may remain caught in a poverty trap even when there are not intergenerational or intertemporal spillovers, intersectoral complementarities, increasing returns to scale or credit market imperfections. Due to the lack of coordination among workers, the role played by some institutions such as universities or unions in escaping the trap becomes crucial. A numerical calibration of the model supports our conclusions.

Keywords: Human capital; Poverty traps; Coordination failure; Public intervention (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C7 I2 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053535711001338
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:soceco:v:41:y:2012:i:1:p:8-17

DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2011.10.005

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza

More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().