The Economic Journal · 2025 · [{"name": "Benjamin Milner", "affiliation": ["University of Alberta"]}]
中文摘要
获得公共教育的机会如何影响职业结果与代际流动性？英国1870年《教育法》在英格兰和威尔士引入了公共教育体系，为探讨这些问题提供了独特的历史背景。利用新近数字化的历史记录，本文发现该法案显著改善了学校供给与出勤率，进而改善了成年后的结果。具体而言，基于回归扭结设计的分析表明，获得公立学校的机会可使儿童成年后从事需要读写能力的职业的概率提高多达17个百分点。本文采用三重差分设定表明，这一效应延伸至距扭结点更远的儿童，且职业结果的质量随受教育年限的增加而逐年提升。为研究该项改革对代际流动性的影响，本文跨时期匹配父子对，利用完整计数历史人口普查数据匹配了近400万个体。研究发现，通过瞄准较低阶层，公立学校的引入在多项衡量指标上显著改善了代际流动性，在某些情况下，高阶层与低阶层儿童之间的成年结果差距缩小了10%以上。
Abstract
Abstract How does access to public education affect occupational outcomes and intergenerational mobility? The UK’s 1870 Education Act, which introduced a public education system in England and Wales, provides a unique historical context in which to explore these questions. Using newly digitised historical records, I find that the Act resulted in significant improvements in school supply and attendance, which in turn improved adult outcomes. In particular, analysis using a regression kink design suggests that public school access improved a child’s chance of obtaining an occupation requiring literacy in adulthood by as much as 17 percentage points. I use a triple difference specification to show that the effect extended to children further removed from the kink, and that the quality of occupational outcomes increased with each additional year of schooling. To study the reform’s effect on intergenerational mobility, I link father-son pairs across time, matching nearly 4 million individuals using full-count historical censuses. I find that, by targeting the lower classes, public school introduction significantly improved intergenerational mobility across numerous measures, with the adult outcome gap between high- and low-class children decreasing by over 10% in some cases.