Schooling, Inequality and Government Policy

Oleksiy Kryvtsov and Alexander Ueberfeldt

Staff Working Papers from Bank of Canada

Abstract: This paper asks: What is the effect of government policy on output and inequality in an environment with education and labor-supply decisions? The answer is given in a general equilibrium model, consistent with the post 1960s facts on male wage inequality and labor supply in the U.S. In the model, education and labor-supply decisions depend on progressive income taxation, the education system, the social security system, and technology-driven wage differentials. Government policies affect output and inequality through two channels. First, a policy change leads to an asymmetric adjustment of working hours and savings of schooled and unschooled individuals. Second, there is a redistribution of the workforce between schooled and unschooled workers. Using a battery of proposed government policies, we demonstrate that skill redistribution dampens the response of wage inequality to a policy change and amplifies the response of output by an additional 1 to 2 percent.

Keywords: Labour markets; Potential output; Productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H52 J31 J38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 65 pages
Date: 2007
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-edu, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/wp07-12.pdf

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:bca:bocawp:07-12

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Working Papers from Bank of Canada 234 Wellington Street, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0G9, Canada. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().