On the political economy of compulsory education

Alessandro Balestrino, Lisa Grazzini and Annalisa Luporini
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Annalisa Luporini: CESifo

Journal of Economics, 2021, vol. 134, issue 1, No 1, 25 pages

Abstract: Abstract We consider an economy with two categories of agents: entrepreneurs and workers. In laissez-faire, the former gain from having their children educated, while the latter, although they may profit from their own education, have no interest in sending their children to school. We first characterise the preferred education policy-cum-redistributive taxation for the two groups, and find that entrepreneurs favour a compulsory education policy while workers prefer a purely redistributive taxation. Each group would like the policy to be entirely financed by the other group. Then, we introduce a political process with probabilistic voting and verify that an equilibrium with both a compulsory education policy and some redistribution may exist in which the workers are constrained but the entrepreneurs, who benefit from hiring educated workers, are not. The redistribution compensates the workers for being constrained by the education policy.

Keywords: Education policy; Redistributive taxation; Probabilistic voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H42 H52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Working Paper: On the political economy of compulsory education (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jeczfn:v:134:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1007_s00712-021-00735-x

DOI: 10.1007/s00712-021-00735-x

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