The role of social background for educational choices and outcomes is considered in an overlapping generations setting. It is shown that the impediments for education created by social factors are similar to a market imperfection, and publicly provided education may lead to a Pareto improvement....

We discuss how a schooling system’s structure may imply that private school enrolment leads to worse subsequent performance in further education or in the labour market, and we seek evidence of such phenomena in Italian data. If students differ not only in terms of their families’ ability to...