The impact of fiscal activity on human capital formation has often been analyzed with regard to the expenditure side of the budget, i.e. the subsidization of (higher) education. Recent contributions have increasingly focused on the effect of taxation on human capital accumulation. Less attention...

This paper presents empirical evidence on the distributional impact of public higher edu- cation through analysis of a cross-sectional view of West Germany in 1997. In contrast to a widely-held hypothesis in economics, our findings do not show evidence for a regressive im- pact. The use of a...