Who Pays for Higher Education?. A Note on the Neglected Role of Income Tax Progression

Richard Sturn and Gerhard Wohlfahrt

FinanzArchiv: Public Finance Analysis, 2000, vol. 57, issue 1, 126-136

Abstract: Do university graduates pay back the public subsidies which they received as students through higher income taxes? Assuming a life cycle version of the ability-to-pay-principle of taxation as the normative foundation, we suggest the "foregone smoothing benefit" concept (FSB) in order to obtain a meaningful answer to this question in the context of a system with progressive income taxation. The FSB-concept abstracts from tax-base-broadening-effects, but hinges on the "income condensing-effect". Using income data for academics and high-school graduates in Austria and the Austrian income tax schedule, we show that the fore-gone smoothing benefit may be quite sizeable.

JEL-codes: H42 I22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mohrsiebeck.com/en/article/who-pays-fo ... 16280015221014006251
Fulltext access is included for subscribers to the printed version.

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:mhr:finarc:urn:sici:0015-2218(200009)57:1_126:wpfhe_2.0.tx_2-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
Mohr Siebeck GmbH & Co. KG, P.O.Box 2040, 72010 Tübingen, Germany

Access Statistics for this article

FinanzArchiv: Public Finance Analysis is currently edited by Alfons Weichenrieder, Ronnie Schöb and Jean-François Tremblay

More articles in FinanzArchiv: Public Finance Analysis from Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thomas Wolpert ().