On the political economy of compulsory education

Alessandro Balestrino, Lisa Grazzini and Annalisa Luporini ()

Working Papers - Economics from Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Scienze per l'Economia e l'Impresa

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 entrepeneurs, who benefit from hiring educated workers, are not.

Keywords: Education Policy; Redistributive taxation; Probabilistic voting. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H42 H52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pbe, nep-pol and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.disei.unifi.it/upload/sub/pubblicazioni/repec/pdf/wp24_2018.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: On the political economy of compulsory education (2021)
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:frz:wpaper:wp2018_24.rdf

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers - Economics from Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Scienze per l'Economia e l'Impresa Via delle Pandette 9 50127 - Firenze - Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giorgio Ricchiuti ().