Essays on the impact of education on misclassified civic outcomes: studies of Italy and the UK

In this dissertation I examine the impact of education on a range of civic outcomes in Italy and the UK which embody two of the main dimensions of social capital: civic engagement and social trust. The central aim of this thesis is to attain a credible relationship between education and civic outcomes, accounting for diverse issues which may obscure it. Namely, unobservables driving education choices (i.e., endogeneity), and the tendency to under-report sensitive topics and over-report civic opinions (i.e., misclassification). This approach allows me to ascertain the extent to which the causal effect of schooling on the civic indicators is either genuine or is driven mainly by endogeneity and a systematic misreporting by educational levels. I also investigate how these elements vary by contextual factors of the two countries. The contribution in this area is given by utilizing data from these two countries, considering a distinct group of civic outcomes (i.e., civic opinions and civic behaviours) and by dealing with misreporting. Previous research does not explicitly control for misclassification and focuses on civic engagement, one aspect of social capital. Furthermore, I con- tribute by introducing a hurdle ordered probit with misclassification to account for two issues regarding the distribution of a self-reported ordered outcome, its skewness and its misclassification. The main findings are: (i) for Italy, qualitative overall conclusions regarding the causality of education on civic outcomes are indeed affected when accounting for misclassification: education turns out to be insignificant across civic behaviours, (ii) for the UK, on the contrary, education has significant positive effects on all civic outcomes due to upward biases induced by endogeneity, (iii) both Italy and the UK, however, do not differ substantially overall with regards to misreporting: most civic outcomes are misclassified for either country, and misreporting is more severe for civic behaviours due to a larger infuence of social desirability.