Role of Parental Income in Educational Attainment
探讨父母收入如何影响子女受教育程度，并分析政府政策（如助学金、低息贷款、低学费公立大学）在缓解流动性约束、提升教育公平与效率中的作用。
During the post-World War II era, U.S. governmental policy has often been based on the idea that (in the absence of government action) access to college and, to a lesser extent, high school education may be limited because of liquidity constraints. The federal and state and local governments have instituted a number of policies to overcome these constraints. These policies include the Basic Opportunity Grants, loan programs that have been issued at or below market interest rates, the expansion of state-supported colleges that charge below-market tuitions rates, and the inception and expansion of local community or county colleges that also charge below-market tuition rates. While there may be noneconomic reasons that explain these changes or their magnitude, economic reasons, that rely on differences between private and social costs and benefits, can also be advanced. These include: (a) wiser societal choices made by a more educated society; (b) recoupment of social costs from higher tax revenues; (c) the reduction of private risks from lending arising from the pooling of risks thereby making the social supply of funds curve available to all individuals at the social discount rate; and (d) state and local economic development. Reason c implies that in the absence of governmental initiative some children would be restricted from achieving their socially optimal amount of education because parents' income and wealth limit their children's choices. Gary Becker (1975), Arthur Okun (1975), and Jere Behrman and myself (1985) argue that governmental policy to reduce private borrowing costs to the level of social costs reduces inefficiency while increasing equity-a rare result in the realm of economics. In this paper I consider why parental income might influence offspring's educational attainment and the policy implications of such an influence.