Speaker:
Daniela Sonedda
- Università del Piemonte Orientale
Wednesday, May 3, 2017
at
12:30 PM
Polo Santa Marta, Via Cantarane 24, Room 1.59
We exploit the exogenous variation generated by a university reform to investigate whether and to what extend non-durable consumption responds to changes in children’s years of schooling.
On average, one more year of education increases household nondurable consumption by 0.15 log points. We interpret this finding as evidence of non-separability in the utility function between children’s schooling and household consumption preferences. Such finding can be partly related to conceiving education as a consumption good rather than purely a multiperiod investment. Our results suggest that both definitions can coexist as long as increasing the children’s human capital accumulation process does not reduce non-durable consumption but complements it. This complementarity is qualitatively robust when we analyse the effect of non-durable consumption on the offspring’s years of schooling exploiting an almost overlapping and independent judicial reform.
- Programme Director
-
Martina
Menon
-
External reference
-
- Publication date
-
December 12, 2016
