This paper reviews and interprets the literature on the effect of
school resources on students‘ eventual earnings and educational
attainment. In addition, new evidence is presented on the impact
of the great disparity in school resources between black and white
students in North and South Carolina that existed in the first half
of the 20th century, and the subsequent narrowing of these resource
disparities. Following birth cohorts over time, gaps in earnings
and educational attainment for blacks and whites in the Carolinas
tend to mirror the gaps in school resources.
Alan Krueger
This paper compares the characteristics of 63 alleged homegrown Islamic terrorists in the U.S.A. to a representative sample of 1,000+ Muslim Americans. The alleged terrorists have about average level of education. Those with higher education were judged closer to succeeding.
This paper analyzes data on 11,600 students and their teachers who were randomly assigned to
different size classes from kindergarten through third grade. Statistical methods are used to
adjust for non-random attrition and transitions between classes. The main conclusions are: (1)
on average, performance on standardized tests increases by 4 percentile points the first year
students attend small classes; (2) the test score advantage of students in small classes expands by
about one percentile point per year in subsequent years; (3) teacher aides and measured teacher
characteristics have little effect; (4) class size has a larger effect for minority students and those
on free lunch; (5) Hawthorne effects were unlikely.
Workers’ compensation insurance provides cash payments and medical.
benefits to workers who incur a work-related injury or illness. Many
features of the workers’ compensation program parallel features of proposed
mandated employer-paid health insurance plans. This paper empirically
examines the incidence of the workers’ compensation program to infer the
likely consequences of mandated health insurance proposals. In certain ,
industries, such as trucking and carpentry, workers’ compensation insurance
costs are quite large, and vary tremendously within states over time, and
across states at a moment in time. This variation is used to identify the
incidence of the program. Empirical analysis of two data sets suggest that
changes in employers’ costs of workers’ compensation insurance are largely
shifted to employees in the form of lower wages. In addition, higher
insurance costs are found to have a negative but statistically
insignificant effect on employment. The implied elasticity of labor demand
from our results is about -.50.
Princeton Affect and Time Survey - Sample Programs
A Case Study of the Fast Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania
This paper presents evidence on the quality of schooling by race and ethnic
origin in the United States. Although substantial racial segregation
across schools exists, the average pupil-teacher ratio is approximately the
same for black and white students. Hispanic students, however, on average have
l0 percent more students per teacher. Relative to whites, blacks
and Hispanics are less likely to use computers at school and at work. The
implications of these differences in school quality for labor market
outcomes are examined. We conclude by examining reasons for the increase
in the black-white earnings gap since the mid-1970s.
This paper summarizes and tries to reconcile evidence from the microeconometric and empirical
macro growth literatures on the effect of schooling on income and GDP growth. Much
microeconometric evidence suggests that education is an important causal determinant of income
for individuals within countries. At a national level, however, recent studies have found that
increases in educational attainment are unrelated to economic growth. This discrepancy appears to
be a result of the high rate of measurement error in first-differenced cross-country education data.
Afier accounting for measurement error, the effect of changes in educational attainment on income
growth in cross-country data is at least as great as microeconometric estimates of the rate of return
to years of schooling. Another finding of the macro growth literature -- that economic growth
depends positively on the initial stock of human capital -- is not robust when the assumption of a
constant-coefficient model is relaxed.
Instrumental Variables (IV) estimates tend to be biased in the same direction as
Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) in finite samples if the instruments are weak. To address
this problem we propose a new IV estimator which we call Split Sample Instrumental
Variables (SSIV). SSIV works as follows: we randomly split the sample in half, and use
one half of the sample to estimate parameters of the first-stage equation. We then use these
estimated first-stage parameters to construct fitted values and second-stage parameter
estimates using data from the other half sample. SSIV is biased toward zero, rather than
toward the plim of the OLS estimate. However, an unbiased estimate of the attenuation
bias of SSIV can be calculated. We use this estimate of the attenuation bias to derive an
estimator that is asymptotically unbiased as the number of instruments tends to infinity,
holding the number of observations per instrument fixed. We label this new estimator
Unbiased Split Sample Instrumental Variables (USSIV). We apply SSIV and USSIV to the
data used by Angrist and Krueger (1991) to estimate the payoff to education.