Do More Educated Leaders Raise Citizens' Education?
37 Pages Posted: 19 Oct 2013
Abstract
This paper looks at the contribution of political leaders to enhance citizens' education and investigate how the educational attainment of the population is affected while a leader with higher education remains in office. For this purpose, we consider educational transitions of political leaders in office and find that the educational attainment of population increases when a more educated leader remains in office. Furthermore, we also observe that the educational attainment of the population is negatively impacted when a country transitions from an educated leader to a less educated one. This result may help to explain the previous finding that more educated political leaders favor economic growth.
Keywords: political leaders, primary education, school achievement, political institutions
JEL Classification: I21, I25, I28
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation