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1 LONG-RUN EFFECTS OF PUBLIC EXPENDITURE IN EDUCATION ON POVERTY AND HEALTH* Marisa Hidalgo-Hidalgo and Iñigo Iturbe-Ormaetxe** April 2013 Abstract: Household characteristics may have long-run effect on individual outcomes when adult. For instance, individuals who lived when young in households experiencing financial problems may be more likely to be poor when adults. Public intervention in education is one of the most important means by which governments try to soften these effects and to promote equality of opportunity. The objective of this paper is to check whether public expenditure in education may have an effect in reducing the probability of being poor when adult, and to what extent. Our main finding is that, public expenditure in primary education has a strong effect on raising individuals above the poverty line, on reducing the probability of suffering health problems when adults and on increasing school attendance beyond compulsory education. Keywords: Public expenditure in education, poverty rate, intergenerational transmission of poverty JEL Classification: H52, I21, I23, J24, J31 * We wish to thank M. Dolores Collado and Laura Crespo for helpful comments. Financial support from Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and FEDER funds (SEJ 2007-62656, ECO2012-34928 and ECO2011-22919), and Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones (IVIE) is gratefully acknowledged. ** M. Hidalgo-Hidalgo: Universidad Pablo de Olavide de Sevilla, [email protected] I. Iturbe- Ormaetxe: Universidad de Alicante, [email protected]

LONG-RUN EFFECTS OF PUBLIC EXPENDITURE IN … LONG-RUN EFFECTS OF PUBLIC EXPENDITURE IN EDUCATION ON POVERTY AND HEALTH* Marisa Hidalgo-Hidalgo and Iñigo Iturbe-Ormaetxe ** April

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Page 1: LONG-RUN EFFECTS OF PUBLIC EXPENDITURE IN … LONG-RUN EFFECTS OF PUBLIC EXPENDITURE IN EDUCATION ON POVERTY AND HEALTH* Marisa Hidalgo-Hidalgo and Iñigo Iturbe-Ormaetxe ** April

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LONG-RUN EFFECTS OF PUBLIC EXPENDITURE IN EDUCATION ON

POVERTY AND HEALTH*

Marisa Hidalgo-Hidalgo and Iñigo Iturbe-Ormaetxe**

April 2013

Abstract: Household characteristics may have long-run effect on individual outcomes

when adult. For instance, individuals who lived when young in households experiencing

financial problems may be more likely to be poor when adults. Public intervention in

education is one of the most important means by which governments try to soften these

effects and to promote equality of opportunity. The objective of this paper is to check

whether public expenditure in education may have an effect in reducing the probability

of being poor when adult, and to what extent. Our main finding is that, public

expenditure in primary education has a strong effect on raising individuals above the

poverty line, on reducing the probability of suffering health problems when adults and

on increasing school attendance beyond compulsory education.

Keywords: Public expenditure in education, poverty rate, intergenerational

transmission of poverty

JEL Classification: H52, I21, I23, J24, J31

* We wish to thank M. Dolores Collado and Laura Crespo for helpful comments. Financial

support from Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and FEDER funds (SEJ 2007-62656,

ECO2012-34928 and ECO2011-22919), and Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones (IVIE) is

gratefully acknowledged.

** M. Hidalgo-Hidalgo: Universidad Pablo de Olavide de Sevilla, [email protected] I. Iturbe-

Ormaetxe: Universidad de Alicante, [email protected]

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1. Introduction

Living in a poor household when young may have negative long-run effects on

individual welfare. When adults, these individuals are more likely to be poor, they are

also more prone to suffer health problems and less likely to stay at school after

compulsory education. These long-run effects reflect the degree of intergenerational

mobility in a society. In countries where social mobility is low, being poor when young

is a good predictor of the probability of being poor when adult, or of the probability of

suffering health problems. Public intervention in education is one of the most important

means by which governments try to soften these long-run effects of poverty and

promote equality of opportunity.

Our objective is to study whether the long-run negative effects of poverty are

mitigated by public expenditure in education, and to what extent.

With this intention, we merge data from the 2005 cross-section of the EU-SILC

(including the module on “Intergenerational transmission of poverty”) with data on

public expenditure in education from the UNESCO database.

We estimate the effect of public expenditure in education during childhood in

our variables of interest. Our main finding is that public expenditure in primary

education has a strong effect on raising individuals above the poverty line, in particular

for those individuals who have more than just compulsory education. The reason for

this can be that spending resources in primary education increases schooling beyond

compulsory education and, therefore, helps to lift individuals above the poverty

threshold when adults. We also find that public expenditure in primary education helps

to reduce the probability of suffering health problems when adults. Surprisingly, now

this effect is stronger for individuals with at most compulsory education. Regarding the

effect on the probability of attending post-compulsory education, we also some a

positive effect of our variable of interest. This seems to be consistent with the effect on

the poverty rate.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the literature. Section 3

describes the data used in the paper. Section 4 presents the empirical model. We discuss

our empirical results in Section 5. Finally, Section 6 concludes.

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2. Literature Review

This paper is related to several strands of the literature. First, the literature on

intergenerational income mobility. Second, the literature that studies the effect of

schooling on several life outcomes, like health and poverty status.

The first strand studies the extent of intergenerational income mobility and

estimates the relationship between parents' economic status and a child's economic

status in adulthood. There have been some important contributions in terms of

measurement of correlations and the forces driving the relationship (see Black and

Devereux, 2011). There are two plausible mechanisms underlying the intergenerational

transmission of poverty or health. On the one hand there may be genetic differences in

ability that are transmitted from parent to child and that lead to intergenerational

persistence in poverty. On the other hand children of wealthy parents earn higher

incomes in part because they invest more in human capital and have more education.

Therefore it is important to understand the mechanisms underlying the observed

intergenerational correlations. If they are in fact due to differential human capital

investment, this suggests a role for public provision or financing of education to

equalize opportunities. While most of the theoretical work on the intergenerational

transmission of economic status considers only parental investments in children,

governments also invest in children's human capital. Mayer and Lopoo (2008) provide

an empirical contribution that takes into account government expenditure. They assess

the relationship between government spending and intergenerational economic mobility

using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and data on state spending from

the U.S. Census of Governments. They find greater intergenerational mobility in high-

spending states compared to low-spending states. They also find that spending on

elementary and secondary schooling has the largest impact on low-income children's

future income. Our paper contributes to this line of research, although there are some

important differences between Mayer and Lopoo (2008) and this paper. First, they focus

on intergenerational income transmission rather than on poverty or on health outcomes

as we do. Second, they fail to consider the endogeneity of schooling decisions to public

expenditure on education. Third, we focus on a group of European countries using data

from the EU-SILC.

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Our identification strategy to assess the impact of government educational

spending on individual’s particular outcomes (poverty and health status) consists of

exploiting country and time differences in expenditure. Several other papers had a

similar approach. For example, state spending on health care has been associated with a

decline in infant mortality (Mayer and Sarin, 2005) and state per pupil spending on

elementary and secondary schooling is associated with higher wages once children are

adults (Grogger, 1996). However, other studies find that expenditure on schools has

little effect on test scores (e.g., Hanushek, 1996, 2001), while others find that spending

increases test scores (e.g., Hedges et al., 1992). Mayer (2002) finds that greater

spending on elementary and secondary schools increases low-income but not high-

income children's educational attainment but that greater spending on college financial

aid increases schooling for high-income but not low-income children. This result

implies that spending on elementary and secondary schooling but not spending on post-

secondary schooling promotes intergenerational mobility. In addition, this evidence

suggests the need for a more thorough investigation of the impact of different levels of

education spending on intergenerational poverty and health transmission.

Within this literature on the relationship between education spending and

educational outcomes, there are some works on the impact of expenditure on

attendance. For example, Meghir and Palme (2004) evaluate the impact of a school

reform, which took place in the 1950s in Sweden, on educational attainment and

earnings. This reform consisted of increasing compulsory schooling, among other

aspects. Thus the reform can alternatively be viewed as an increase in the per capita

public expenditure on education. They find that the reform increased both the

educational attainment and the earnings of those whose fathers had just compulsory

education.

Finally, the impact on education on health has been the object of some academic

interest. There is a growing body of work that suggests that improvements in education

can improve health. See Lochner (2011) for an interesting review of recent

developments on these “nonproduction” benefits of education. A substantial body of

recent research has tried to disentangle the causal component of the correlation and to

understand the mechanisms driving the causal link (see Cutler and Lleras-Muney (2011)

for an example of the latter and a discussion). Longitudinal studies collecting very rich

information on childhood environment and childhood outcomes have been used to

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identify plausibly causal links between childhood environment, childhood endowments

and health and years of schooling on the one hand, and between all of these variables

and adult health on the other hand (Case, Fertig, and Paxson (2005), Currie and Hyson

(1999), and Conti, Heckman & Urzua (2010)). This paper belongs also to this body of

research. In particular we study the impact of parental poverty on individuals’ education

attainment and both variables (together with very rich information regarding child

environment) on adult health status.

3.- Data and descriptive statistics

Estimating whether government expenditure increases intergenerational mobility

requires individual-level data on adult’s income together with information on the

characteristics of the households where that adult grew up. It also requires a source of

variation in government expenditure. In this study we merge data drawn from the 2005

cross section of the EU-SILC database with data from the UNESCO database for

Education. We build a database comprising 17 European countries.1 These are the

countries in the EU-SILC database for which we have enough data on public

expenditure in education.

The 2005 cross section of the EU-SILC database includes a special module on

inter-generational transmission of poverty.2 This module has information on parental

background and childhood circumstances. This information includes, in particular,

family composition, year of birth of parents, activity and occupation of parents. One of

the questions (PM100) provides retrospective information about the economic situation

when the individual was a teenager. They are asked how frequent financial problems in

the household were when they were young teenagers. It is a categorical variable that

takes values from 1 (most of the time) to 5 (never).3 We summarize the information of

PM100 by constructing a binary variable that takes value 1 when PM100 is either 1 or

2. We call this variable “poor_past”. It tells us whether an individual experienced

1 The list of countries is: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland,

Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom. 2 For an overview of EU-SILC, see Wolff, Montaigne, and Rojas González (2010). To access further

information about EU’s regulations concerning the SILC, data documentation provided by Eurostat, and

SILC variable lists, we recommend the EU-SILC web portal provided by the GESIS research institute at

http://www.gesis.org/ 3 Frequencies are: (1) Most of the time, 7.3%; (2) often, 10.9%; (3) occasionally, 21.0%; (4) rarely,

20.9%; never, 33.6%. There is a 6.4% of missing values. Total number of observations is 52,972.

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difficulties when teenager or not. Four of the countries in our sample (Austria, France,

Greece, and Portugal) do not report information on economic circumstances when

young (variable PM100) and so are not included in the graphical below, although we

will use them in Section 4.

Since we want to use the intergenerational module, we have to exclude from the

2005 cross section all individuals who are not in the age range (25-65) or are not the

selected respondent. Since we want to assess the long-run effect of household

characteristics, we also exclude those individuals who lived in a collective house or an

institution when young.

In Figure 1 below we represent for each country the fraction of individuals for

whom the variable poor_past is 1 in blue (PM100 is either 1 or 2). We also represent in

red the fraction of individuals who were most of the time in difficult circumstances

(PM100 is 1). As can be observed there is a lot of variation across countries, mainly

with regard to the fraction of individuals who had financial problems often or most of

the time. This goes from a maximum of 30.2% in Italy to a minimum of 7.4% in

Norway. The overall mean of poor_past is 19.3%.

0.1

.2.3

IT HU UK IE CY ES FI NL LU BE SE DK NO

Figure 1: Financial problems when young by country

Often or most of the time

Most of the time

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As we said above, to the EU-SILC sample we merge data on public expenditure

in education from the UNESCO Database for Education. The UNESCO Database for

Education contains country data on public expenditure in education per student as a %

of per capita GDP at three levels (primary, secondary, tertiary).4 We want to construct a

variable that imputes to each individual a measure of the public resources used to

finance his/her education. We propose a simple approach which consists of assigning to

each individual a number (called “exp_p”) that corresponds to average public spending

in primary education during the years this individual age was between 6 and 11. This

could be considered as a rough measure of school quality. The idea is that this

individual went through primary education in that age bracket. As an example, consider

an individual who was born in Spain in 1970. This individual went to primary education

between 1976 and 1981. We compute average expenditure in primary education in the

years from 1976 to 1981, and assign this number to the variable exp_p for this

individual. In a similar way we can impute expenditure in secondary and tertiary

education. However, not all individual go to secondary or tertiary education. This is

why we focus only on expenditure in primary education, since this is the only

expenditure that all individuals within a country enjoy.

To illustrate the data we use, in Figure 2 below we show the ratio of per capita

expenditure on primary and secondary education to GDP per capita for the 17 countries

in our sample.

4 See http://www.uis.unesco.org/Education/Pages/default.aspx

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As can be seen in Figure 2, there is variation both across countries and through

time. If we focus on primary education, Greece and Sweden are the lowest and highest

spending countries in this period, respectively. We also see that per capita expenditure

in primary education was below per capita expenditure in secondary education for most

countries (with the exceptions of Denmark, Hungary, Norway and Sweden). Regarding

per capita expenditure in secondary education over GDP per capita, Greece is again the

lowest spending country, while Belgium is now the highest spending country.

We also assume that educational attainment does not change after the age of 25

and we restrict our sample to include individuals born between 1960 and 1980. We also

exclude those individuals who were not born in the country. Our final sample consists

of 66,377 individuals from 17 countries.

02

04

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1970 1980 1990 2000 1970 1980 1990 2000 1970 1980 1990 2000

1970 1980 1990 2000 1970 1980 1990 2000

AT BE CY DK ES

FI FR GR HU IE

IT LU NL NO PT

SE UK

Primary education

Secondary education

Source: UNESCO database.

Figure 2: Expenditure in education as % of per capita GDP

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Our objective is to study whether public expenditure in primary education has an

effect on adult circumstances. To do this we focus on three endogenous variables that

are potentially interesting. The first one is the individual’s current poverty status. This is

the information contained in the variable HX080, which is an indicator of whether the

individual lives in a family with income below the poverty threshold. The poverty line

corresponds to 60% of equivalized household disposable income. We define a dummy

variable called “poor” which is 1 whenever HX080 is 1. The mean value of poor is

12.05%. We represent in Figure 3 the percentage of individuals below the poverty line

in each country. The maximum value corresponds to Spain (17.6%) and the minimum to

Denmark (5.8%).

Our second variable of interest is a variable describing individual’s health status.

In the EU-SILC there are several variables that provide information on health status.

From these variables we choose one (PH030) which describes whether individuals are

limited in daily activities because of health problems. This is a better measure of health

than PH010 (general health status). The reason is that several authors consider it as a

0.0

5.1

.15

.2

ES PT GR IT HU UK IE FI AT FR CY BE NO LU NL SE DK

Figure 3: Poverty rate by country

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quasi-objective indicator.5 Possible answers to this question are 1 (strong limitation), 2

(limitation), and 3 (no limitation). We build a binary variable called “limited” that takes

value 1 when PH030 is either 1 or 2. In Figure 4 we represent the percentages of the

variable limited for the countries in our sample. The maximum value is in Finland

(27.6%) and the minimum in Greece (6.8%). The overall mean is 11.87%.

Our third and last endogenous variable measures whether the individual has

more than just compulsory education. We use the variable PE040 that describes the

highest ISCED education level attained by the individual. We construct a dummy

variable (“post-compulsory education”) that takes value 1 when PE040 is 3, 4 or 5. That

is, our variable corresponds to having more than lower secondary education. In Figure 5

we represent the fraction of the population in each country that has more than

5 There is an intense debate on the reliability of work-disability as true measure of health status in the

literature (see Benitez-Silva et al. (2004)). However work-disability has been found to be powerful

predictors for a range of outcomes and behaviors. Examples of such phenomena are labor supply

decisions (Stern (1989); Dwyer and Mitchell (1999)) and individuals’ decisions to apply for, and the

government’s decision to award, disability insurance benefits from the Social Security Administration

(Benitez-Silva et al. (1999)).

0.1

.2.3

FI HU IE ES LU BE SE AT PT NO UK NL FR CY DK IT GR

Figure 4: Limited individuals by country

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compulsory education. The maximum is in Norway (96%) and the minimum in Portugal

(31.2%). The overall mean is 74.2%.

Our next objective is to study the correlation between our measure of the

economic situation when the individual was a teenager (poor_past) and each one of our

three endogenous variables of interest (poor, limited, noncomp_educ). The simplest way

of doing this is to compute probabilities for these three variables, conditional on the two

possible values of the variable poor_past. When we do this, we find a strong correlation

between this variable and each one of our three endogenous variables. This is what we

show in Table 1 below.

Table 1: Long-run effects of poverty

Poor Limited

Post-comp.

ed.

4.164 4.421 31.169

poor_past=0 10,50 11,14 78,98

1.718 1.583 5.595

poor_past=1 18,08 16,65 59,11

5.882 6.003 36.764

all 11,96 12,21 75,14

0.2

.4.6

.81

NO SE UK FI AT BE DK FR NL CY HU LU GR IE IT ES PT

Figure 5: Fraction with post-compulsory education

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To read Table 1, let us focus on the first column (the one labeled “Poor”). The

probability of being below the poverty line today, conditional on not having

experienced financial problems when teenager, is 10.50%. But for those who

experienced those problems it is 18.08%. We also find striking differences with regard

to the probability of having limitations because of health problems (11.14% vs. 16.65%)

and in the probability of attending post-compulsory education (78.98% vs. 59.11%). We

illustrate this correlation in a series of figures in which we represent the probability of

being poor today (Figure 6), having limitations (Figure 7), and attending post-

compulsory education (Figure 8), depending on whether the household where the

individual was living had a good, bad, or very bad financial situation.

In Figure 6 we observe that the relation between being poor in the past and today

is weaker in those countries where the poverty rate is low, as in the Scandinavian

countries.

0.1

.2.3

IE ES IT BE CY HU LU UK FI NL NO SE DK

Figure 6: Poverty rate by financial situation when teenager

Good Bad

Very bad

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Comparing figures 6 and 7, we see that the effect of past poverty on the

probability of experiencing limitations because of health problems today happens for all

countries. Moreover, this effect seems to be independent of the proportion of

individuals with limitations in the country.

Finally, in Figure 8 we observe that the effect of living in a poor household on

the probability of having more than compulsory education is larger in countries with a

low percentage of individuals with more than compulsory education. For countries

where almost the whole population has more than compulsory education (Norway,

Sweden, UK, and Finland) there are almost no differences.

0.1

.2.3

.4

FI LU HU NO BE CY SE ES IE UK NL DK IT

Figure 7: Limited by financial situation when teenager

Good Bad

Very bad

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4. Empirical model

Since we intend to identify the causal relationship that public expenditure on

education has on our endogenous variables of interest, we need to control as accurately

as possible for additional factors affecting these dependent variables. Our set of

additional explanatory variables includes gender, age, age squared, together with a set

of household characteristics (family composition, education and occupation of parents,

etc). These household characteristics are included in the special module on inter-

generational transmission of poverty of the 2005 cross section of EU-SILC. The

inclusion of these additional controls helps us to reduce selection bias. Now the

important issue is that, when we include all these controls, we cannot identify the effect

of the variable poor_past. The reason is simply that this variable is very well explained

by the set of household characteristics we are using. However this is not a problem,

since our interest is not to identify the effect of the variable poor_past, but the effect of

the variable exp_p. In fact, there are two approaches that yield very similar estimates for

the effect of exp_p. In the first one, we regress our variable of interest with respect to

poor_past, exp_p, some individual characteristics (age, gender) and a set of country

dummies. In the second approach, we replace the variable poor_past with household

characteristics from the module. In the sequel, we will focus on this second approach.

0.2

.4.6

.81

NO SE UK FI BE DK CY HU NL LU IE IT ES

Figure 8: Post-compulsory education by financial situation when teenager

Good Bad

Very bad

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Another reason for not including the variable poor_past in our analysis is that this

allows us to use data of the four countries that lack information of that variable (Austria,

France, Greece, and Portugal). In Table 2 we present the main descriptive statistics.

Insert Table 2 here

We propose to estimate a separate Probit model for each one of our three

endogenous variables of interest:

��� = �� + ���_�� + ���� + ��� + ��� , (1)

where ��� is our endogenous (binary) variable for individual i who lives in country c.

Variable �_�� is our measure of the size of the educational budget invested in a

particular individual, while ��� denotes family background variables to control for

differences in household characteristics. The term �� contains a set of dummy variables

to control for country-specific characteristics.

We assume that the error term ��� is not correlated with �_��. In addition, the

error term (conditional on the rest of explanatory variables) follows a normal

distribution. However, we check that a linear probability model gives almost identical

results for the estimation of the coefficient of interest (the coefficient of �_��).

We estimate each model for all individuals in the sample and for individuals

with different levels of education. In particular, we divide individuals into two groups

according to whether they have at most compulsory education or they have more than

just compulsory education. In addition, and because of the existing evidence on gender

differences in education, health, and poverty, we estimate gender-specific equations.

Finally, since we combine individual-level data with group-level data in our variable of

interest (exp_p), errors are clustered at the country and year of birth level.6

The crucial issue for identification is the assumption regarding exogeneity of

public expenditure. Variation in this variable arises because of differences in

expenditure across countries at the same point in time and differences in country

expenditure over time. Either difference could be partly endogenous with respect to

poverty rate, because given the same tax rate countries with a low proportion of poor

households raise more revenue than countries with a high proportion of poor

6 See Moulton (1986) for the importance of controlling for cluster effects.

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households. In addition, some forms of expenditure are entitlements so that countries

with many poor households will have to spend more than countries with few poor

households. Other invariant country characteristics such as the political and social

climate could also be related to both country expenditure and children’s eventual

income. To partially address this issue, we add country fixed effects to the model to

control invariant factors within countries.

One nice feature of our data on public expenditure is that it is a percentage of per

capita GDP, which eliminates economic cycle issues.

5. Results

In Tables 3, 4, and 5 we compute the marginal effects corresponding to some of

the explanatory variables on our three endogenous variables poor, limited, and

noncomp_educ, respectively. For the sake of brevity we do not present the marginal

effects corresponding to the country dummies. We will focus first on Table 3, where the

endogenous variable is poor. We present the results of five different models. In Model 1

we include all individuals. In models 2 and 3 we separate individuals by gender. In

Model 4 we restrict our sample to individuals with at most compulsory education.

Finally, in Model 5 we only consider individuals with more than just compulsory

education. We do the same in Table 4, where the dependent variable is limited.

In Table 3 we see that the effect of being raised in a family with only a mother

on the probability of being poor strong, particularly for individuals who have at most

compulsory education. Another variable that has a positive effect on that probability is

having a father that is unemployed. However, both variables turn not significant when

we focus on individuals with post-compulsory education. On the other hand, it is clear

that parental education reduces very much the probability of being poor.

Interestingly, we find that the marginal effect of exp_p has always a negative

sign. This means that indeed educational expenditure in primary education reduces the

probability of being poor when adult, although this effect is not always statistically

significant. To give an idea of the size of the effect of exp_p on poor, consider the

model in which we pool all individuals (Column 1). In this case we obtain a marginal

effect of -.00216. This means that increasing exp_p by one percentage point (recall it is

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measured as % of per capita GDP) reduces the probability of being poor by 0.216

percentage points. This is a sizable effect since the mean of poor is 12.05%. Moreover,

increasing exp_p by one standard deviation reduces the probability of being poor by

0.216*8.555 = 1.8 percentage points. This represents a 15% of the mean value of the

variable poor.

In Table 4 we find some differences with respect to Table 3. Although in all

cases the sign of the marginal effect of exp_p is negative, the only case in which we find

a statistically significant effect is when we consider only individuals with at most

compulsory education. In fact, for this group the marginal effect is very large.

Now we focus on Table 5, where the endogenous variable is post-compulsory

attendance. Again we observe that the being raised in a family with only a mother

reduces the probability of attending post-compulsory education, and mostly for women.

On the other hand, it is clear that parental education increases very much the probability

of attending post-compulsory education. We find that the marginal effect of exp_p has

always a positive sign. This means that indeed educational expenditure increases the

probability of attending post-compulsory education, although this effect is only

statistically significant in the first model in which we pool all individuals. The

magnitude of the effect is similar when we divide the sample by gender, although we

lose significance.

6. Conclusions

TBW.

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Table 2: Summary Statistics

Variable Mean St. Dev. Min Max N. obs.

Poor today 0.120 0.326 0 1 66363

Limited 0.119 0.323 0 1 66191

Post-compulsory education 0.742 0.438 0 1 65384

Poor when young 0.193 0.395 0 1 49188

Exp. primary educ. (% GDP per

capita) 16.91 8.551 4.358 56.05 66003

Single mother family 0.0734 0.261 0 1 64649

Father secondary education 0.437 0.496 0 1 57733

Father tertiary education 0.109 0.312 0 1 57733

Mother secondary education 0.414 0.492 0 1 60000

Mother tertiary education 0.0786 0.269 0 1 60000

Father unemployed 0.00909 0.0949 0 1 60266

Father blue collar 0.493 0.500 0 1 55779

Female 0.509 0.500 0 1 66377

Age 34.98 5.450 24 45 66377

Age squared 1254 379.1 576 2025 66377

Not citizen 0.00457 0.0674 0 1 66302

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Table 3: Endogenous variable is poor

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

VARIABLES All Men Women Comp. Educ

Post-Comp.

Educ

age -0.0133** -0.0238*** -0.00299 0.00548 -0.0175***

(0.00523) (0.00603) (0.00600) (0.0135) (0.00432)

age2 0.000179** 0.000331*** 2.87e-05 -9.63e-05 0.000232***

(7.36e-05) (8.51e-05) (8.51e-05) (0.000191) (6.19e-05)

gender 0.0152*** 0.0528*** 0.00871***

(0.00286) (0.00867) (0.00260)

singlemotherfam 0.0370** 0.0381* 0.0373* 0.145*** 0.00383

(0.0147) (0.0206) (0.0195) (0.0395) (0.0124)

oldfather 0.00787 0.00459 0.0116 0.00557 0.00615

(0.00641) (0.00886) (0.00905) (0.0141) (0.00693)

oldmother 0.00627 0.0180 -0.00595 0.0222 -0.00535

(0.00975) (0.0149) (0.0114) (0.0202) (0.00997)

educfatherM -0.0527*** -0.0499*** -0.0547*** -0.0795*** -0.0202***

(0.00419) (0.00619) (0.00528) (0.0126) (0.00387)

educfatherH -0.0543*** -0.0446*** -0.0640*** -0.0889*** -0.0232***

(0.00479) (0.00652) (0.00635) (0.0306) (0.00462)

educmotherM -0.0535*** -0.0508*** -0.0562*** -0.0753*** -0.0285***

(0.00462) (0.00648) (0.00602) (0.0144) (0.00427)

educmotherH -0.0484*** -0.0482*** -0.0483*** -0.0521 -0.0257***

(0.00539) (0.00666) (0.00775) (0.0485) (0.00482)

father_manual -0.00309 -0.00967** 0.00310 -0.0239*** -0.00395

(0.00320) (0.00397) (0.00475) (0.00919) (0.00306)

fatherunemp 0.0956*** 0.112*** 0.0832** 0.183*** 0.0253

(0.0283) (0.0401) (0.0348) (0.0633) (0.0264)

exp_p -0.00216*** -0.00258*** -0.00177* -0.00292 -0.00143**

(0.000767) (0.000962) (0.000966) (0.00211) (0.000683)

noncitizen 0.0825** 0.0653* 0.103** 0.0962 0.0749**

(0.0337) (0.0357) (0.0495) (0.0778) (0.0313)

Observations 47,301 22,931 24,370 11,803 35,244

Robust standard errors in parentheses

*** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1

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Table 4: Endogenous variable is limited

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

VARIABLES All Men Women Comp. Educ

Post-Comp.

Educ

age 0.00444 0.0147*** -0.00538 0.0195** 0.00115

(0.00360) (0.00462) (0.00488) (0.00854) (0.00387)

age2 -8.35e-06 -0.000162** 0.000139** -0.000210* 2.96e-05

(5.14e-05) (6.65e-05) (7.01e-05) (0.000122) (5.53e-05)

gender 0.0109*** 0.00225 0.0153***

(0.00280) (0.00596) (0.00317)

singlemotherfam 0.0517*** 0.0360* 0.0651*** 0.0566* 0.0439***

(0.0132) (0.0191) (0.0204) (0.0320) (0.0136)

oldfather -0.00713 0.00564 -0.0184** -0.0129 -0.00798

(0.00570) (0.00906) (0.00817) (0.0116) (0.00634)

oldmother 0.00327 -0.00361 0.0105 0.0105 0.000760

(0.00946) (0.0126) (0.0127) (0.0218) (0.0117)

educfatherM -0.00720* -0.00740 -0.00712 0.0125 0.000635

(0.00425) (0.00596) (0.00563) (0.0117) (0.00451)

educfatherH -0.0136** -0.0190** -0.00806 0.0949*** -0.00565

(0.00546) (0.00785) (0.00796) (0.0361) (0.00602)

educmotherM -0.0167*** -0.0165** -0.0162** -0.00786 -0.00775

(0.00456) (0.00666) (0.00639) (0.0127) (0.00497)

educmotherH -0.0315*** -0.0298*** -0.0328*** -0.000540 -0.0198***

(0.00609) (0.00796) (0.00843) (0.0349) (0.00637)

father_manual 0.0165*** 0.0197*** 0.0135*** 0.0144** 0.0126***

(0.00293) (0.00401) (0.00430) (0.00626) (0.00340)

fatherunemp 0.0149 0.0532 -0.0166 0.0645 -0.00542

(0.0220) (0.0372) (0.0294) (0.0520) (0.0259)

exp_p -0.000744 -0.00127 -0.000295 -0.00257* -0.000306

(0.000473) (0.000816) (0.000696) (0.00140) (0.000472)

noncitizen 0.0176 0.0123 0.0212 -0.0361 0.0311

(0.0204) (0.0282) (0.0327) (0.0362) (0.0261)

Observations 47,290 22,924 24,366 11,806 35,230

Robust standard errors in parentheses

*** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1

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Table 5: Endogenous variable is postcomp_educ

(1) (2) (3)

VARIABLES All Men Women

age -0.0102 -0.00505 -0.0176**

(0.00656) (0.00838) (0.00706)

age2 7.67e-05 3.13e-05 0.000157

(9.45e-05) (0.000121) (0.000101)

gender 0.0324***

(0.00451)

singlemotherfam -0.0773*** -0.0706** -0.0784***

(0.0212) (0.0336) (0.0247)

oldfather -0.0207** -0.0323** -0.0110

(0.00896) (0.0134) (0.0111)

oldmother -0.0175 -0.00629 -0.0263

(0.0146) (0.0223) (0.0171)

educfatherM 0.131*** 0.136*** 0.125***

(0.00626) (0.00833) (0.00777)

educfatherH 0.187*** 0.205*** 0.169***

(0.00525) (0.00703) (0.00654)

educmotherM 0.113*** 0.120*** 0.106***

(0.00641) (0.00812) (0.00859)

educmotherH 0.171*** 0.171*** 0.173***

(0.00605) (0.00906) (0.00705)

father_manual -0.0559*** -0.0440*** -0.0647***

(0.00446) (0.00614) (0.00595)

fatherunemp -0.0213 0.0448 -0.0769*

(0.0288) (0.0344) (0.0407)

exp_p 0.00148* 0.00155 0.000965

(0.000892) (0.00127) (0.000980)

noncitizen -0.0372 -0.0317 -0.0494

(0.0336) (0.0420) (0.0479)

Observations 47,062 22,805 24,180

Robust standard errors in parentheses

*** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1