In this paper we study the long-term labor market implications of school resource equalization
before Brown and school desegregation after Brown. For cohorts born in the South in the 1920s and
1930s, we find that racial disparities in measurable school characteristics had a substantial influence on
black males’ earnings and educational attainment measured in 1970, albeit one that was smaller in the
later cohorts. When we examine the income of male workers in 1990, we find that southern-born blacks
who finished their schooling just before effective desegregation occurred in the South fared poorly
compared to southern-born blacks who followed behind them in school by just a few years.
schooling
In a recent, and widely cited, paper, Ashenfelter and Krueger (1994) use a new sample of identical
twins to investigate the contribution of genetic ability to the observed cross-sectional return to schooling.
This paper re-examines Ashenfelter and Krueger’s estimates using three additional years of the same twins
survey. I find that the return to schooling among identical twins is about 10 percent per year of schooling
completed. Most importantly, unlike the results reported in Ashenfelter and Krueger, I find that the within-
twin regression estimate of the effect of schooling on the log wage is smaller than the cross-sectional
estimate, implying a small upward bias in the cross-sectional estimate. Ashenfelter and Krueger’s
measurement error corrected estimates are insignificantly different from those presented here, however.
Finally, there is evidence of an important individual-specific component to the measurement error in
schooling reports.