The effect of school inputs on labor market outcomes is an important and controversial topic, both in the United States and in developing countries. A large literature about American schools has not settled debate on the issue. Card and Krueger (1992) estimate the effect of pupil/teacher ratios and teachers’ salaries on the rate of return to education for men born between 1920 and 1950, observed in the 1980 census. Controlling for state of birth effects, state of residence effects, and differences in returns to education between regional labor markets, they find a large, negative and significant effect of pupil/teacher ratios on the rate of return to education. Hanushek et al. (1996) and Heckman et al. (1996) challenge aspects of the Card and Krueger analysis. Hanushek et al. notes that the level at which school characteristics are aggregated affects the estimation results, and claims that aggregation biases upward estimated school quality effects. Heckman et al., replicating the Card and Krueger results in the 1970, 1980, and 1990 censuses, makes clear the importance of allowing for non-linearities in the returns to education when estimating the impact of school resources, and of allowing for differences in the impact of school quality across labor markets. They find school quality effects are weak for those with exactly 12 years of schooling, and strong only for those who attend college. Card and Krueger (1996) present a thorough review and discussion of this literature, but debate on how to interpret the literature on American schools is far from settled.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Research Program in Development Studies. in its series Working Papers with number
219.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)