Saturday, February 17, 2007

Does Income Affect Educational Attainment?

My discussion paper in the Geary series finds no effect from income on participation in higher education. A new working paper from the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (I don't whether they're for or against) is called "Does Money Buy Higher Schooling? Evidence from Secondary School Track Choice in Germany".
This paper suggests that income has no positive causal effect on educational attainment and that differences between high- and low-income households are driven by unobserved heterogeneity, e.g. differences in motivation. This is getting at something very interesting.
I'll look into the author (Marcus Tamm) a bit more, but I already think that he could be somebody very worthwhile getting over for a Geary seminar.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I was looking at Tamm's web-page, and its solid enough: http://www.rwi-essen.de/servlet/page?_pageid=503&_dad=portal30&_schema=PORTAL30

I think he's finishing his PhD at the moment but he had work on poverty published as an IZA discussion paper in 2005, and he has an article on health insurance forthcoming in Health Economics. This can be read as a discussion paper from the place where he works (RWI) here: http://www.rwi-essen.de/pls/portal30/docs/FOLDER/PUBLIKATIONEN/RWIDP/RWI_DP028/DP_05_028.PDF

He's also given a presentation on "Reference Bias in Self-Assessed Health" but I can't find an associated publication.