Increasing Returns to Education and the Skills Under-Investment Trap

Alison Booth and Melvyn Coles

No 1657, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We model educational investment and labor supply in a competitive economy with home and market production. Heterogeneous workers are assumed to have different productivities both at home and in the workplace. We investigate the degree to which there is under-investment in human capital, and examine the deadweight losses that accrue via distortionary taxes. We show that there are increasing returns to education at the participation margin, and that deadweight losses are most severe for workers located here. Although the social planner's optimum implies the worker should choose a high level of education and participate in the market sector, instead the worker chooses not to invest in human capital and either non-participation or partial participation in market-sector work. A severe deadweight loss is generated by this substitution effect. Those individuals most likely to be in this trap are those types with large enough home productivity, who are likely either to be involved in home production or to be characterized by a strong preference for other non-market sector activities.

Keywords: income tax; returns to education; home production; labor supply (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H24 J13 J24 J31 J42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2005-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published - published as 'A Microfoundation for Increasing Returns in Human Capital Accumulation and the Under-Participation Trap' in: European Economic Review, 2007, 51 (7), 1661-1681

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp1657.pdf (application/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:iza:izadps:dp1657

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().