Over the past years, education attainment has increased at an unprecedented rate in Great Britain. We analyze how the education expansion affected inequality in household net incomes since the early 2000s. We show that, all else being equal, education composition changes led to higher living standards mostly through higher wages. As education expansion led to larger income gains in the middle and top than at the bottom of the distribution, income inequality increased. Despite the increasing share of high-educated workers, we find limited evidence of a “compression” effect on inequality, as the higher education wage premium remained broadly unchanged.

中文翻译：

---

英国不断变化的教育分配和收入不平等

在过去的几年里，英国的受教育程度以前所未有的速度增长。我们分析了自 2000 年代初以来教育扩张如何影响家庭净收入的不平等。我们表明，在其他条件相同的情况下，教育构成的变化主要是通过提高工资来提高生活水平。由于教育扩张导致中间和顶部的收入增加大于底部的收入，收入不平等加剧。尽管受过高等教育的工人比例不断增加，但我们发现对不平等的“压缩”效应的证据有限，因为高等教育工资溢价基本保持不变。