Vincoli di liquidità e accumulazione di capitale umano: evidenza empirica sulle famiglie italiane

My empirical work investigates the correlation between the capital market imperfections and the human capital accumulation. There is evidence in the literature that liquidity constraints affect human capital accumulation (Christou, 2001; De Gregorio, 1996; Teng Sun and Yannelis, 2013). In this paper, I have elaborated on this channel so as to detect if and to what extent financial market imperfections can act as a deterrent to human capital accumulation. While many studies look at the US context, this paper adds to the literature by using a data set that was not exploited for this kind of studies before, i.e. the Bank of Italy's Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW). Moreover, some empirical studies on this subject are conducted using aggregate data at country level, but I decided to rely on micro data at household level to avoid the endogeneity problems that often arise when dealing with macro data. This empirical work has found a negative correlation between liquidity constraints and tertiary education. In particular, results suggest that if a child belongs to a family constrained in the credit market, s/he has about 10% less probability of attending a university degree course, on average. This implies that if credit is given to households that are credit constrained, this could have a positive impact on the probability of going to university for children in those families. As far as the upper secondary education is concerned, I have found no significant correlation between borrowing constraints and the probability of attending high school. This result can be explained by the fact that high school education is free in Italy. Hence, liquidity constraints do not play an important role. Preferences are crucial in this case and just the opportunity cost is taken into consideration when taking this decision. As a robustness check to my analysis, I also partitioned the sample in two subsamples, a poorer and a richer one. Interestingly, findings show that an increase in financial activities has no effect on tertiary education of a child who is relative rich, while it has a positive impact on the probability of attending university for a relative poor child. Finally, results suggest that an increase in financial activities that could be due to access to credit is associated to an increase in the probability of a child of attending university, but this increase in probability is lower for a family which is richer in terms of consumption. In other words, if the child is poor, the effect of an increase in money available to the family has a valuable effect on child's tertiary education. Hence, the empirical evidence presented here suggests that in Italy, liquidity constraints are negatively correlated with the tertiary educational level attained.