Labor Market Effects of School Quality: Theory and Evidence

No 5450, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper presents an overview and interpretation of the literature relating school quality to students' subsequent labor market success. We begin with a simple theoretical model that describes the determination of schooling and earnings with varying school quality. A key insight of the model is that changes in school quality may affect the characteristics of individuals who choose each level of schooling, imparting a potential selection bias to comparisons of earnings conditional on education. We then summarize the literature that relates school resources to students' earnings and educational attainment. A variety of evidence suggests that students who were educated in schools with more resources tend to earn more and have higher schooling. We also discuss two important issues in the literature: the tradeoffs involved in using school-level versus more aggregated (district or state-level) quality measures; and the evidence on school quality effects for African Americans educated in the segregated school systems of the South.

JEL-codes: I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996-02
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (127)

Published as in Gary Burtless (ed.), Does Money Matter? The Link Between Schools, Student Achievement and Adult Success,(Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 1996)pp.97-140.(With David Card).

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w5450.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Labor Market Effects of School Quality: Theory and Evidence (1996)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:5450

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w5450

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().