When I began to think of writing the present volume, the economics of education was a topic for specialists. I became interested in the process of acquiring education through the study of the intergenerational mobility of incomes. I wondered how it was possible that countries with free access to public education could be characterised by such different degrees of persistence of family backgrounds across generations. As soon as one starts wondering why people attend school, and for how long, a host of additional questions emerge. Does family income affect the educational choices of children? Does schooling affect labour productivity? Are educational resources (in particular, the quantity of teachers, and how well remunerated they are) effective in raising educational attainment in a population? This book aims to provide an overview of possible answers to these and similar questions, which have been posed in the recent economic literature.

I am indebted to several colleagues and fellow authors, and quite often to friends as well, for the development of most of the ideas reported in this volume. In particular, I would like to express my gratitude to Giorgio Brunello and Luca Flabbi for commenting on specific parts of the book, and to Tullio Jappelli and Giuseppe Bertola for lengthy discussions about the optimal configuration of educational systems.