Endogenous Determination of Public Budget Allocation across Education Stages

Public Expenditure on Education and Skill Formation: Is There a Simple Rule to Maximize Skills?

“…For this reason, the structure of the system matters because performance at earlier stages affects the output at higher levels; budget allocation rules should take this into account. To analyse this point, hierarchical education models have been used by Driskill & Horowitz (2002), Driskill et al (2009), Su (2004, 2006, as well as Estevan & Verheyden (2010). However, this approach is not commonly used in discussing policy issues in education.…”

“…In this model, contrary to that in Su (2004), an individual's decision to become educated or to enter the labour market is not modelled; instead, the simple model here assumes a particular dropout function that easily captures the elements in an individual's decision to study. Also, unlike the works of Su (2006) and Estevan & Verheyden (2010), which deal with the political economy of budget allocation, which is endogenously determined, the focus here is on the optimal conditions for budget allocation in a steady-state economy, so the growth approach of Driskill & Horowitz (2002) and Driskill et al (2009) is not followed.…”

College curriculum, diverging selectivity, and enrollment expansion

“…It builds on a growing literature that emphasizes the hierarchical structure of the education process one of whose important new insights is that the benefits from investing in superior quality of education at a given stage may critically depend, and even be contingent upon sufficient preparation at its prior stage. Driskill and Horowitz (2002), Su (2004Su ( , 2006, Blankenau (2005), Blankenau, Cassou, and Ingram (2007), Cunha and Heckman (2007), and Gilpin and Kaganovich (2012) model education as a sequence of stages, where human capital output from lower stages acts as an input in the education technology at higher stages. In particular, the models of Su (2004Su ( , 2006 and Gilpin and Kaganovich (2012) feature a curricular threshold standard at the higher education stage, which sets the minimum pre-college preparation level necessary for making educational gains in college.…”

Education Curriculum and Student Achievement: Theory and Evidence

“…On the theoretical side, there is a growing literature that focuses on the hierarchical nature of the education process, namely the human capital output from an earlier stage is an input for human capital accumulation and improves the learning effectiveness at a subsequent stage of education (see, for example, Ben-Porath, 1967;Lucas, 1988;Driskill and Horowitz, 2002;Su, 2004Su, , 2006Blankenau, 2005;Blankenau et al, 2007;Cunha and Heckman, 2007;Gilpin and Kaganovich, 2012). More specifically, a few of these studies (Su, 2004(Su, , 2006Gilpin and Kaganovich, 2012;Kaganovich and Su, 2015) focus on the role of a curricular threshold as an important determinant in the education technology, and derive the implications of such a threshold on the aggregate efficiency and distributional equality.…”