Abstract

This article focuses on education acquisition and inequality, the impact of education on economic and social outcomes and on how changes in education, together with the pattern of demand for skills, affect earnings and income distributions. Section 2 considers research that looks at connections between education acquisition and inequality at different stages of the life cycle. Section 3 discusses the economic impact of education. Section 4 considers how changes in education have altered the distribution of wages and employment and affected labour market inequality. This has become a very large research area, with evidence from many settings showing that education matters more for labour market outcomes than it did in the past. Section 5 offers some conclusions about research in this area, briefly linking it to contemporary discussions about education policy.