The distributional impact of subsidies to higher education - empirical evidence from Germany

Abstract

"The present paper deals with the net-transfer-calculation and the data (section II) presents empirical evidence for the distribution of children from various income brackets in the German higher educations system (section III) and builds a net transfer calculation on this analysis in order to ascertain the net incidence which is presented in section IV. Section V provides further extensions including the distributional impact of partial cut of the subsidies. Aditionally, it shall be investigated in section V how various kinds of benefits from public higher education affect the income distribution within households with children entrolled in higher education. To judge the statistical inference, bias corrected and accelerated confidence intervals (BC2) via bootstrapping are used. The main goal of this procedure is to point out which kind of benefit significantly affects the income distribution within the subgroup that consists only of net-gainer. The main goal of the present paper is to assess this argument critically for West-Germany, using cross section data for the year 1997." (excerpt)