The Design of Optimal Education Policies
研究功利主义政府如何设计教育政策，发现最优政策是精英导向的：它拉大聪明与不聪明孩子的教育差距，且不聪明孩子的教育水平取决于父母收入，同时政策具有投入累退性。
This paper studies the education policy chosen by a utilitarian government. In the model, households differ in their income and in their children's ability; income is observed by the government, but ability is private information. Households can use private education, but cannot borrow to finance it. The government can finance education with income tax, but at the cost of blunting the individuals' incentive to exert labour market effort. The optimal education policy we derive is elitist: it increases the spread between the educational achievement of the bright and the less bright individuals, compared to private provision. It is also such that the education received by less bright individuals depends positively on their parental income. Finally, the optimal education policy is input regressive, in the sense of Arrow (1971, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 38, 175–208): households with higher income and brighter children contribute less in tuition fees towards the cost of the education system than households with lower income and less bright children. Copyright 2002, Wiley-Blackwell.