General Equilibrium Cost Benefit Analysis of Education and Tax Policies

James Heckman, Lance Lochner and Christopher Taber

No 6881, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper formulates and estimates an open-economy overlapping generation general-equilibrium model of endogenous heterogeneous human capital in the form of schooling and on-the-job training. Physical capital accumulation is also analyzed. We use the model to explain rising wage inequality in the past two decades due to skill-biased technical change and to estimate investment responses. We compare an open economy version with a closed economy version. Using our empirically grounded general equilibrium model that explains rising wage inequality, we evaluate two policies often suggested as solutions to the problem of rising wage inequality: (a) tuition subsidies to promote skill formation and (b) tax policies. We establish that conventional partial equilibrium policy evaluation methods widely used in labor economics and public finance give substantially misleading estimates of the impact of national tax and tuition policies on skill formation. Conventional microeconomic methods for estimating the schooling response to tuition overestimate the response by an order of magnitude. Simulations of our model also reveal that move to a flat consumption tax raises capital accumulation and the real wages of all skill groups and barely affects overall measures of income inequality.

JEL-codes: H43 H52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge
Note: LS PE
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (32)

Published as Ranis, G. and L. K. Raut (eds.) Trade, Growth and Development: Essays in Honor of Professor T. N. Srinivasan. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science B. V., 1999.

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