Economic Growth and the Cultural Transmission of Attitudes towards Education

This analysis investigates path-dependencies in a growing economy where altruistic parents try to inculcate their children with a behavioural trait that is conducive to human capital formation. The initial stock of physical capital is critical because it shapes the population dynamics of behavioural traits which, in turn, impinge on the formation of physical and human capital. Despite the absence of a complementarity in the process of cultural instruction, the long-run equilibrium can also depend on the initial distribution of behavioural traits among the population, as long as the efficiency of the external elements of cultural transmission is sufficiently low for households with parents who did not adopt the human capital-promoting trait when they, themselves, were young.