[go: up one dir, main page]

  EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Human Capital Investment and Debt Constraints

David Andolfatto () and Martin Gervais

Labor and Demography from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: When young individuals face binding debt constraints, their human capital investments will be insufficiently financed by private creditors. If generations overlap, then a well-designed fiscal policy may be able to improve human capital investments by replacing missing capital markets with an intergenerational transfer scheme. Boldrin and Monte (2002) demonstrate that the optimal (balanced budget) fiscal policy in this context entails the joint provision of an education subsidy for the young and a pension program for the old, financed with a tax on those in their peak earning years. We demonstrate, however, that the desirability of such a policy depends crucially on the assumption of an exogenous debt constraint. If debt constraints arise endogenously for reasons of limited commitment, then the optimal (balanced budget) fiscal policy looks radically different. Furthermore, we find that arbitrary (non-optimal) policy interventions may actually lead to lower levels of human capital investment as altered default incentives induce private creditors to contract the supply of student loans by an amount greater than the subsidy. In some cases, the constrained-optimal policy entails zero intervention. These results highlight the importance of taking seriously the reasons for why debt constraints exist, before recommending any specific policy intervention.

JEL-codes: J (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2004-12-24
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 18
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/lab/papers/0412/0412006.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Human Capital Investment and Debt Constraints (2006) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpa:wuwpla:0412006

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Labor and Demography from University Library of Munich, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by EconWPA ().

 
Page updated 2024-08-09
Handle: RePEc:wpa:wuwpla:0412006