The Effect of Education on Equity Holdings

Abstract

We study the effect of education on equity ownership in the form of stocks or mutual funds (outside of retirement accounts). We find a causal effect of education on stockholding using the number of colleges in the county where the respondent grew up as an instrument and data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The effect is particularly strong for whites from non-privileged backgrounds. We explore the channels through which education affects equity holdings using the Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey and find that, controlling for family fixed effects, increased cognition and features associated with having a white-collar job appear to be the main channels.

Education, inequality and use of digital collaborative platforms: The European case

“…We use microdata from a 2016 Eurobarometer survey on the use of collaborative platforms, corresponding to the 28 member states of the European Union, to estimate the causal relationship between educational level and participation in DCPs. We use the number of universities existing in the respondent’s region of residence when they were aged 16 according to the European Tertiary Education Register (ETER, 2018) as an instrumental variable (IV) of educational level to estimate the unbiased effect of education on the probability of participation (Card, 1995, 1999; Currie and Moretti, 2003; Hryshko et al, 2012). The justification of the instrument is based on the fact that the availability of universities plays a central role in the decision to enrol in higher education (Card, 1995), while it does not seem to have a direct influence on the use of collaborative platforms.…”