QoG lunch seminar with John Nye

Abstract:

Does education promote support for liberal economic views? We show in a large cross-section of countries that – in almost all cases – those with higher educational attainment are more market liberal and less sympathetic to economic regulation than those who have less formal education.  This is true, both in countries with high support for markets, as well as those with high distrust of markets and strong support for government regulation.  Using five social surveys (RLMS-HSE, LITS, WVS, EVS, TREC), different measures of pro-market values and different types of regressions, we show this holds in the vast majority of countries.  When considering Russian micro data, we find that those with more education are relatively less supportive of market regulation regardless of whether they were educated in the Soviet period or in the post-Soviet era.  Parental education is a positive predictor of pro-market values. Thus, this effect is nearly universal, and its sign is unaffected by different institutions.

Keywords: education, world, market values, regression, fixed effects, random effects.