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The causal effect of education on earnings
TLDR
This paper surveys the recent literature on the causal relationship between education and earnings and concludes that the average (or average marginal) return to education is not much below the estimate that emerges from a standard human capital earnings function fit by OLS.Abstract:
This paper surveys the recent literature on the causal relationship between education and earnings. I focus on four areas of work: theoretical and econometric advances in modelling the causal effect of education in the presence of heterogeneous returns to schooling; recent studies that use institutional aspects of the education system to form instrumental variables estimates of the return to schooling; recent studies of the earnings and schooling of twins; and recent attempts to explicitly model sources of heterogeneity in the returns to education. Consistent with earlier surveys of the literature, I conclude that the average (or average marginal) return to education is not much below the estimate that emerges from a standard human capital earnings function fit by OLS. Evidence from the latest studies of identical twins suggests a small upward "ability" bias -- on the order of 10%. A consistent finding among studies using instrumental variables based on institutional changes in the education system is that the estimated returns to schooling are 20-40% above the corresponding OLS estimates. Part of the explanation for this finding may be that marginal returns to schooling for certain subgroups -- particularly relatively disadvantaged groups with low education outcomes -- are higher than the average marginal returns to education in the population as a whole.read more
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Changing returns to education across cohorts : selection, school system or skills obsolescence?
TL;DR: The authors investigated whether economic returns to education in Norway differ across cohorts and found that there has been a decline in the return to education across cohorts, and that the cohort differences seem to have been driven by selection effects.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Relationship Between Wife’s Education and Husband’s Earnings: Evidence from 1960 to 2000
TL;DR: The authors found a positive relationship between a wife's education and her husband's earnings using data from the 1960s and 1970s, and the size of the coefficient decreases from 1960 to 2000.
ReportDOI
Life Cycle Earnings, Education Premiums and Internal Rates of Return
TL;DR: In this article, a detailed analysis of the causal relationship between schooling and earnings over the life cycle is presented, showing that additional schooling gives higher lifetime earnings and a steeper age-earnings profile, in line with predictions from human capital theory.
Dissertation
The philosophy of computational social science
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present an initial analysis of the methodology, epistemology and ontology of computational social science, by examining the following topics: 1) verification and validation and 2) modelling and theorising, 3) mechanisms 4) explanation 5) agency, action and interaction and 6) entities and process philosophy.
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Ageing and Literacy Skills: Evidence from Canada, Norway and the United States
David Green,W. Craig Riddell +1 more
TL;DR: This article studied the relationship between age and literacy skills in Canada, Norway and the U.S. and found that the modest negative slope of the literacy-age profile in cross-sectional data arises from offsetting ageing and cohort effects.