This paper provides a simple model of hierarchical education to study the political determination of public education spending and its allocation between different tiers of education. The model integrates private education decisions by allowing parents, who are differentiated according to income and human capital, to top up public expenditures with private transfers. We identify four groups of households with conflicting preferences over the the size of the public education budget and its allocation. In equilibrium, public education budget, private expenditures and expenditure allocation among different tiers of education, depend on which group of households is in power and on country-specific features such as income inequality and intergenerational persistence in education. By running a cluster analysis on 32 OECD countries, we seek to establish if distinctive ‘education regimes’, akin to those identified in the theoretical analysis, could be discerned. Our main finding is that a high intergenerational persistence in education might foster the establishment of education regimes in which the size and the allocation of the public budget among different tiers of education prevent a stable and significant increase of the population graduation rate, thus plunging the country in a ‘low education’ trap.

本文提供了一个简单的等级教育模型来研究公共教育支出的政治决定及其在不同教育层次之间的分配。该模型通过允许根据收入和人力资本进行区分的父母通过私人转移来补充公共支出来整合私人教育决策。我们确定了对公共教育预算规模及其分配有不同偏好的四组家庭。在均衡状态下，公共教育预算、私人支出和不同教育层级之间的支出分配取决于掌权的家庭群体以及国家特定的特征，例如收入不平等和代际教育的持续性。通过对 32 个经合组织国家进行聚类分析，我们试图确定是否可以辨别出类似于理论分析中确定的那些独特的“教育制度”。我们的主要发现是，教育的高度代际坚持可能会促进教育体制的建立，在这种体制中，不同教育层次的公共预算的规模和分配阻止了人口毕业率的稳定和显着增加，从而使国家陷入困境。陷入“低教育”陷阱。