Family Income and Tertiary Education Attendance acrossthe EU: An empirical assessment using sibling data

There is plenty of evidence across the EU to suggest that young people from poorerbackgrounds are less likely to attend tertiary education than their better-off peers. Thiscorrelation is often used to justify monetary transfers to families with students. It isnot clear, however, that these differences in attendance are caused by income itselfrather than by parental ability, motivation, education, and other aspects of the youngperson’s experience which differ between families, but are not a direct result ofincome. Controlling for observable family characteristics is a useful first step. Butfurther developments are needed as families potentially differ in unobservable waysthat are correlated with both income and attendance. In this paper we use families withseveral children to correct for unobserved time-invariant family fixed effects. Ourresults suggest the absence of parental income effects in Belgium and Germany, smallpositive effects in Poland, medium-size positive effect in the UK, and sizeablepositive effects in Hungary.[...]