Expansion of schooling and educational inequality in Europe: the educational Kuznets curve revisited

This article analyses the relationship between schooling expansion and educational inequality in a panel of developed countries over different birth cohorts. We extend previous literature by exploiting the longitudinal dimension of our data and by focussing on different measures of inequality. Using either a Gini or a Theil measure of inequality, we find evidence that at higher average levels of education further increases are associated with rising inequality. The inverted-U Kuznets curve appears to depend on using the standard deviation as the measure of inequality. We also discuss how educational policies may influence educational inequality and find that the length of compulsory education affects inequality only through its effect on average education, whilst school tracking shapes inequality independently of the level of education. © Oxford University Press 2013. All rights reserved.