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Family Income and Tertiary Education Attendance across the EU: An empirical assessment using sibling data

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  • Vincent Vandenberghe

Abstract

There is plenty of evidence across the EU to suggest that young people from poorer backgrounds are less likely to attend tertiary education than their better-off peers. This correlation is often used to justify monetary transfers to families with students. It is not clear, however, that these differences in attendance are caused by income itself rather than by parental ability, motivation, education, and other aspects of the young person's experience which differ between families, but are not a direct result of income. Controlling for observable family characteristics is a useful first step. But further developments are needed as families potentially differ in unobservable ways that are correlated with both income and attendance. In this paper we use families with several children to correct for unobserved time-invariant family fixed effects. Our results suggest the absence of parental income effects in Belgium and Germany, small positive effects in Poland, medium-size positive effect in the UK, and sizeable positive effects in Hungary.

Suggested Citation

  • Vincent Vandenberghe, 2007. "Family Income and Tertiary Education Attendance across the EU: An empirical assessment using sibling data," CASE Papers case123, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE.
  • Handle: RePEc:cep:sticas:case123
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    File URL: https://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/case/cp/CASEpaper123.pdf
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

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    3. Lopes, Margarida & Fernandes, Graça, 2012. "A comprehensive approach towards academic failure: the case of Mathematics I in ISEG graduation," MPRA Paper 42367, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Marcel Gérard, 2008. "Financing Bologna, the Internationally Mobile Students in European Higher Education," CESifo Working Paper Series 2391, CESifo.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Tertiary education attendance; parental income; liquidity constraints;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I28 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Government Policy
    • D33 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Factor Income Distribution
    • H43 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Project Evaluation; Social Discount Rate

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