IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jmacro/v80y2024ics0164070424000132.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Economic uncertainty, households’ credit situations, and higher education

Author

Listed:
  • Koirala, Niraj P.
  • Koirala, Dhiroj Prasad
  • Nyiwul, Linus
  • Hu, Zhining

Abstract

In this paper, we study the relationship between economic uncertainty, households’ credit situations, and educational outcomes. Using the System Generalized Methods of Moments (SYS-GMM) on educational and economic data from the World Bank and IMF, we find that economic uncertainty and households’ access to credit have positive impacts on higher education. Further analyses suggest that economic uncertainty and households’ access to credit have heterogeneous effects on educational outcomes at the tertiary level, by gender and development status. Specifically, we find that economic uncertainties expand enrollments in developed countries and contract them in developing economies. In addition, access to credit has a more pronounced positive impact on educational outcomes in developing nations compared to developed ones. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that household credit coupled with economic uncertainty decreases women’s educational outcomes in higher education, posing a serious threat to gender equality in higher education. Lastly, we find that monetary policy appears to play a role in these results. These findings remain robust to alternative proxies of economic uncertainty and approach such as the Instrumental Variable (IV) regression method, which uses a political database on government changes and ideological gaps between cabinets as instruments. In general, the findings emphasize the enduring influence of economic uncertainties, typically associated with business cycles, on long-term aspects such as education.

Suggested Citation

  • Koirala, Niraj P. & Koirala, Dhiroj Prasad & Nyiwul, Linus & Hu, Zhining, 2024. "Economic uncertainty, households’ credit situations, and higher education," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 80(C).
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:jmacro:v:80:y:2024:i:c:s0164070424000132
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jmacro.2024.103598
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0164070424000132
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jmacro.2024.103598?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Economic uncertainty; Higher education enrollments; Households’ financial situation; Monetary policy; IV regression; SYS-GMM;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E43 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Interest Rates: Determination, Term Structure, and Effects
    • G51 - Financial Economics - - Household Finance - - - Household Savings, Borrowing, Debt, and Wealth
    • I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General
    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
    • I23 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Higher Education; Research Institutions
    • I28 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Government Policy

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jmacro:v:80:y:2024:i:c:s0164070424000132. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/622617 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.