Growth and Cultural Preference for Education

Chu, Angus C. and Furukawa, Yuichi and Zhu, Dongming (2015): Growth and Cultural Preference for Education.

Abstract

In this note, we explore the implications of cultural preference for education in an innovation-driven growth model that features an interaction between endogenous human capital accumulation and technological progress. Parents invest in children's education partly due to the preference for their children to be educated. We consider a preference parameter that measures the degree of this parental or cultural preference for education. We find that a higher degree of parental preference for education increases human capital, which is conducive to innovation, but the increase in education investment also crowds out resources for R&D investment. As a result, a stronger cultural preference for education has an inverted-U effect on the steady-state equilibrium growth rate. We also analytically derive the complete transitional path of the equilibrium growth rate and find that an increase in the degree of education preference has an initial negative effect on economic growth.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: economic growth, human capital, education, culture
• Subjects: E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics > E2 - Consumption, Saving, Production, Investment, Labor Markets, and Informal Economy > E24 - Employment ; Unemployment ; Wages ; Intergenerational Income Distribution ; Aggregate Human Capital ; Aggregate Labor Productivity; O - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth > O3 - Innovation ; Research and Development ; Technological Change ; Intellectual Property Rights > O31 - Innovation and Invention: Processes and Incentives; O - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth > O4 - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity > O41 - One, Two, and Multisector Growth Models

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