Family income and tertiary education attendance across the EU: an empirical assessment using sibling data

Vincent Vandenberghe

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: There is plenty of evidence across the EU to suggest that young people from poorer backgrounds are less likely to attend tertiary education than their better-off peers. This correlation is often used to justify monetary transfers to families with students. It is not clear, however, that these differences in attendance are caused by income itself rather than by parental ability, motivation, education, and other aspects of the young person’s experience which differ between families, but are not a direct result of income. Controlling for observable family characteristics is a useful first step. But further developments are needed as families potentially differ in unobservable ways that are correlated with both income and attendance. In this paper we use families with several children to correct for unobserved time-invariant family fixed effects. Our results suggest the absence of parental income effects in Belgium and Germany, small positive effects in Poland, medium-size positive effect in the UK, and sizeable positive effects in Hungary.

Keywords: tertiary education attendance; parental income; liquidity constraints (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D33 H43 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2007-06
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:6214

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