刊行物

内容紹介

This report presents the results of the research conducted under the ResearchProject entitled "Inequality of Education: From the Perspective of Intergenerational Transfers" during the Fiscal Year 2017. The main objective of this project was to examine the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment using microdata on Japan. While there has been a steady increase in the level of educational attainment in many developed countries, including Japan, since World War II, we continue to observe the intergenerational persistence of educational attainment. By exploiting unique information on whether children have ever given up schooling for financial reasons and, if they have, which level of schooling they have forgone, this report pays particular attention to the role of borrowing constraints in determining intergenerationaleducational mobility.

It is hoped that the findings of this research will help policymakers become better informed about the implications of borrowing constraints for intergenerational educational mobility. To reduce the financial burden on parents of children's educational expenses, the Japanese government has been making efforts to enhance student scholarship/loan programs, such as the expansion of interest-free loans and the provision of scholarships that do not require repayment, in recent years. The government has also been discussing the possibility of making education, including university education, free of charge. It is hoped that this report sheds light on how effective these ongoing efforts would be to ensure that qualified children would not be deprived of education opportunities for economic reasons.

I am grateful to the Asian Growth Research Institute (AGI) for its financialsupport of this research. This work was also supported by JSPS (Japan Society for thePromotion of Science) KAKENHI Grant Number 15H01950 and a grant from the MEXTJoint Usage/Research Center at the Institute of Social and Economic Research, OsakaUniversity. Furthermore, the empirical work undertaken in this report utilizes micro datafrom the Preference Parameters Study of Osaka University's 21st Century Center of Excellence (COE) Program "Behavioral Macrodynamics Based on Surveys and Experiments" and its Global COE Project "Human Behavior and Socioeconomic Dynamics." I acknowledge the program/project's contributors-Yoshiro Tsutsui, Fumio Ohtake, and Shinsuke Ikeda.

I am also grateful to Erbiao Dai, Isaac Ehrlich, Tomoki Fujii, Tatsuo Hatta, Joel Hellier, Jean Hindriks, Charles Yuji Horioka, Jong-Wha Lee, Xiaonan Sun, Keiko Tamada, Ryuichi Tanaka, Anh Tran, Tien Manh Vu, and other participants of the Asian Development Bank Institute-AGI Workshop on Public and Private Investment in Human Capital and Intergenerational Transfers in Asia, the Macro Seminar at the Department of Economics, Korea University, the Workshop on "Equity in Education" at the CatholicUniversity of Leuven, the Rokko Forum at the Graduate School of Economics, KobeUniversity, and the AGI Staff Seminar for their valuable comments