published in: Economics of Education Review, 2005, 24 (5), 563-577
We study whether the combined significant reduction in the pupil-teacher ratio and increase
in parental education observed in Italy between the end of World War II and the end of the
1980s have had a significant impact on the educational attainment and the labor market
returns of a representative sample of Italians born between 1941 and 1970. We find that the
lower pupil-teacher ratio is positively correlated with higher educational attainment, but that
the overall improvement of parental education has had an even stronger impact on
attainment. We also find that the positive impact of better school quality on educational
attainment and returns to education has been particularly significant for the individuals born
in regions and cohorts with poorer family background. Parental education has had
asymmetric effects, positive on attainment and negative on school returns. Better school
quality has also had asymmetric effects on the returns to education, positive for individuals
with poor family background and negative for individuals born in regions and cohorts with
relatively high parental education. Our evidence suggests that better school quality,
measured by a lower pupil-teacher ratio, is a technical substitute to parental education in the
production of individual human capital. When school quality and family background are
substitutes, an increase of public resources invested in education can be used to reduce the
differences induced by parental education.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.