Dispersion in the economic return to schooling

The Economic Return to Primary Schooling in Victorian England

Using longitudinal data on individual males linked between the English censuses of 1851 and 1881, this study examines the effect of childhood primary school attendance on adult socioeconomic status. Primary schooling was not compulsory, nor was it state provided. Primary education was a choice made by parents for their children. The panel nature of the data allows both the schooling decision an...

The Rate of Return to Private Schooling

The Rate of Return to Private Schooling This paper examines the relationship between “school quality” and earnings in the United Kingdom. The specific focus is on evaluating the effect that private schooling has on hourly wage rates. It is well known that private (i.e. fee-paying) schools compared to state schools score higher on most measures of school quality. Therefore by comparing individua...

Unobserved Ability and the Return to Schooling

Unobserved Ability and the Return to Schooling We estimate a structural dynamic programming model of schooling decisions with unobserved heterogeneity in school ability and market ability on a sample taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Both the instantaneous utility of attending school and the wage regression function are estimated flexibly. The null hypothesis that the...

Further estimates of the economic return to schooling from a new sample of twins

In a recent, and widely cited, paper, Ashenfelter & 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 & 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% per yea...

Estimates of the Economic Return to Schooling from a New Sample of Twins