IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cra/wpaper/2011-03.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Income Equality, School Performance and Educational Mobility

Author

Listed:
  • Philipp C. Bauer
  • Christoph A. Schaltegger

Abstract

Is income equality a precondition for higher school performance and higher educational mobility? Or is the opposite true? We test empirically whether school performance and intergenerational transmission of educational attainment is depending on income equality on the local level. Using Swiss data, we take advantage of an exogenous variation across 2740 local municipalities. Our results point to a beneficial effect of income inequality on school performance for children with middle educated parents. In contrast, children with poorly educated parents as well as children with highly educated parents perform worse in more unequal communities. However, the popular idea that societies with a more equal income distribution inevitably enhance the upward mobility of disadvantaged children cannot be confirmed.

Suggested Citation

  • Philipp C. Bauer & Christoph A. Schaltegger, 2011. "Income Equality, School Performance and Educational Mobility," CREMA Working Paper Series 2011-03, Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA).
    • Handle: RePEc:cra:wpaper:2011-03
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.crema-research.ch/papers/2011-03.pdf
    File Function: Full Text
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.crema-research.ch/abstracts/2011-03.htm
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    inequality; intergenerational transmission; mobility; educational attainment; income distribution; human capital;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I2 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education
    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
    • I30 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - General
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • D30 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - General
    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:cra:wpaper:2011-03. 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: Anna-Lea Werlen (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cremach.html .

    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.