Open AccessPosted Content
The causal effect of education on earnings
Reads0
Chats0
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
Citations
More filters
Book ChapterDOI
Chapter 8 The Social Value of Education and Human Capital
Fabian Lange,Robert H. Topel +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors review and extend the empirical literature that seeks evidence of a wedge between the private and social returns to human capital, specifically education, and find that there is no evidence from this literature that social returns are smaller than private ones.
Journal ArticleDOI
The drivers of happiness inequality: suggestions for promoting social cohesion
TL;DR: In this article, the authors identify and quantify the contribution of a set of covariates in affecting levels and over time changes of happiness inequality, making use of a recent methodology that allows decomposing the overall change in happiness inequality into composition and coefficient effects of each covariate.
Posted Content
A theory-based measure of the output of the education sector
TL;DR: In this paper, the output of the Norwegian higher education sector is estimated based on a modification of the methodology introduced by Jorgenson and Fraumeni (JF) (1989).
Journal ArticleDOI
A New Test of Borrowing Constraints for Education
TL;DR: In this paper, the expected family contribution (EFC) model is used to identify the set of families that are disproportionately likely to not provide their full EFC, and the model identifies a set of children who face quantitatively important borrowing constraints for higher education.
Journal ArticleDOI
Gender differences in education effects on all-cause mortality for white and black adults in the United States.
Anna Zajacova,Robert A. Hummer +1 more
TL;DR: The findings suggest that men do not benefit from educational attainment uniformly more than women, and the most notable difference is the steeper educational gradient at high schooling levels for white men compared to white women.