Between 1960 and 1980 the gap in earnings between black and white
males narrowed by 15 percent. A detailed analysis of 1960, 1970, and 1980
Census data indicates that increases in the relative return to education
were largely responsible for black workers’ relative earnings gains. One
explanation for these higher returns is that they reflect the market
valuation of higher-quality schooling available to later cohorts of black
students. To investigate the role of school quality in the convergence of
black and white earnings, we have assembled data on three aspects of school
quality -- pupil/teacher ratios, annual teacher pay, and term length -- for
black and white schools in l8 segregated states from 1915 to 1966. The
school quality data are then linked to estimated rates of return to
education for men from different cohorts and states. Improvements in the
relative quality of black schools explain roughly 20 percent of the
narrowing of the black-white earnings gap in this period.
education
Families originally living in public housing were assigned housing vouchers by lottery,
encouraging moves to neighborhoods with lower poverty rates. Although we had hypothesized
that reading and math test scores would be higher among children in families offered vouchers
(with larger effects among younger children), the results show no significant effects on test
scores for any age group among over 5000 children ages 6 to 20 in 2002 who were assessed four
to seven years after randomization. Program impacts on school environments were considerably
smaller than impacts on neighborhoods, suggesting that achievement-related benefits from
improved neighborhood environments are small.
The primary goal of this paper is to investigate whether participation in terrorist activity
can be linked to ignorance (measured through schooling) or to economic desperation
(measured through poverty on the individual’s level and various economic indicators on
the societal level) using newly culled data of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)
terrorist cells. This paper performs a statistical analysis of the determinants of
participation in Hamas and PIJ terrorist activities in Israel from the late 1980’s to the
present, as well as a time series analysis of terrorist attacks in Israel with relation to
economic conditions. The resulting evidence on the individual level suggests that both
higher standards of living and higher levels of education are positively associated with
participation in Hamas or PIJ. With regard to the societal economic condition, no
sustainable link between terrorism and poverty and education could be found, which I
interpret to mean that there is either no link or a very weak indirect link. Special attention
is given to the suicide bomber phenomenon, and the analysis of the determinants of
becoming a suicide bomber provides additional intriguing findings. In contrast with the
“classic” characteristics of a suicidal individual (Hamermesh and Soss, 1974), suicide
bombers tend to be of higher economic status and higher educational attainment than
their counterparts in the population. Suicide bombers, however, come from lower socioeconomic
groups when compared to other, non-suicidal, terrorists.
ln CPS data, the 20% of the civilian labor force with 1-3 years of college earn 15% more
than high school graduates. We use data from the National Longitudinal Study of the High School
Class of I972 which includes postsecondary transcript data and the NLS Y to study the distinct returns
to 2-year and 4-year college attendance and degree completion. Controlling for family income and
measured ability, wage differentials for both 2-year and 4-year college credits are positive and
similar. We find that the average 2-year and 4-year college student earned roughly 5% more than
similar high school graduates for every year of credits completed. Second, average bachelor and
associate degree recipients did not earn significantly more than those with similar numbers of college
credits and no degree, suggesting that the credentialling effects of these degree are small. We report
similar results from the NLSY and the CPS.
In addition to controlling for family background and ability measures, we pursue two IV
strategies to identify measurement error and selection bias. First, we use self-reported education as
an instrument for transcript reported education. Second, we use public tuition and distance from the
closest 2-year and 4-year colleges as instruments, which we take as orthogonal to schooling
measurement error and other unobserved characteristics of college students. Although research over
the past decade has been preoccupied with selection bias, the two biases roughly cancel each other,
suggesting that the results above are, if anything, understated.
This paper uses a new survey to contrast the wages of genetically
identical twins with different schooling levels. Multiple measurements of
schooling levels were also collected to assess the effect of reporting
error on the estimated economic returns to schooling. The data indicate
that omitted ability variables do not bias the estimated return to
schooling upward, but that measurement error does bias it downward.
Adjustment for measurement error indicates that an additional year of
schooling increases wages by 12-l6t, a higher estimate of the economic
returns to schooling than has been previously found.
This paper quantities the extent to which the rise in the measured
return to education between I979 and 2000 is reflecting a change in the
causal effect of education on labor market eamings. The conceptual issues
are formalized in a two-factor model of ability. schooling and eamings that
allows heterogeneity in absolute and comparative advantage across the
population. ln particular, the framework implies that a rise in the true return
to education will increase the degree of convexity of the relationship
between eamings and years of education for a fixed cohort of individuals.
Permanent differences in the levels of the eamings-schooling relationship
across cohorts will arise if the mapping between schooling and ability differs
across cohorts. These implications of the two-factor model allow the
identification of changes in the causal effect of education over time and
across cohorts.
During the Vietnam draft priority for military service was randomly
assigned to draft-age men in a series of lotteries. However, many men
managed to avoid military service by enrolling in school and obtaining an
educational deferment. This paper uses the draft lottery as a natural
experiment to estimate the return to education and the veteran premium.
Estimates are based on special extracts of the Current Population Survey
that the Census Bureau assembled for 1979 and 1981-85. The results suggest
that an extra year of schooling acquired in response to the lottery is
associated with 6.6 percent higher weekly earnings. This figure is about
10 percent higher the OLS estimate of the return to education for this
sample, which suggests there is little ability bias in conventional
estimates of the return to education. Our findings are robust to a variety
of "alternative assumptions about the effect of veteran status on earnings.
This paper estimates the effects of school quality -- measured by the
pupil-teacher ratio, the average term length, and the relative pay of
teachers -- on the rate of return to education for men born between 1920 and
1949. Using earnings data from the 1980 Census, we find that men who were
educated in states with higher quality schools have a higher return to
additional years of schooling, holding constant their current state of
residence, their state of birth, the average return to education in the
region where they currently reside, and other factors. A decrease in the
pupil-teacher ratio from 30 to 25, for example, is associated with a 0.4
percentage point increase in the rate of return to education. The estimated
relationship between the return to education and measures of school quality
is similar for blacks and whites. Since improvements in school quality for
black students were mainly driven by political and judicial pressures, we
argue that the evidence for blacks reinforces a causal interpretation of the
link between school quality and earnings. We also find that returns to
schooling are higher for students educated in states with a higher fraction
of female teachers, and in states with higher average teacher education.
Holding constant school quality measures, however, we find no evidence that
parental income or education affects state-level rates of return.
It is frequently asserted that a college's female undergraduate enrollment in the sciences and engineering can be increased by raising female representation on the faculties in these areas. Despite the widespread acceptance of this proposition, it does not appear to have been subjected to any kind of serious statistical analysis. In this paper, we assemble panel data from three rather different educational institutions, and use them to examine the relationship between the gender composition of the students in an academic department and the gender composition of its faculty at the time the students were choosing their majors. We find no evidence for the conventional view that an increase in the share of females on a department's faculty leads to an increase in its share of female majors.
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.