Abstract not found

This paper presents evidence showing that individuals' season of birth is related to their educational attainment because of the combined effects of school start age policy and compulsory school attendance laws. In most school districts, individuals born in the beginning of the year start schoo at a slightly older age, and therefore are eligible to drop out of school after completing fewer years of schooling than individuals born near the end of the year. Our estimates suggest that as many as 25 percent of potential dropouts remain in school because of compulsory schooling laws. We estimate the impact of compulsory schooling on earnings by using quarter of birth as an instrumental variable for education in an earnings equation. This provides a valid identification strategy because date of birth is unlikely to be correlated with omitted earnings determinants. The instrumental variables estimate of the rate of return to education is remarkably close to the ordinary least squares estimate, suggesting that there is little ability bias in conventional estimates of the return to education. The results also imply that individuals who are compelled to attend school longer than they desire by compulsory schooling laws reap a substantial return for their extra schooling.

The twelfth century rabbinic scholar Maimonides proposed a maximum class size of 40. This same maximum induces a nonlinear and nonmonotonic relation-ship between grade enrollment and class size in Israeli public schools today. Maimonides’ rule of 40 is used here to construct instrumental variables estimates of effects of class size on test scores. The resulting identification strategy can be viewed as an application of Donald Campbell’s regression-discontinuity design to the class-size question. The estimates show that reducing class size induces a significant and substantial increase in test scores for fourth and fifth graders, although not for third graders.

Although schooling and earnings are highly correlated, social scientists have argued for decades over the causal effect of education. A convincing analysis of the causal link between education and earnings requires an exogenous source of variation in education outcomes. This paper explores the use of college proximity as an exogenous determinant of schooling. An examination of the NLS Young Men Cohort reveals that men who grew up in local labor markets with a nearby college have significantly higher education and significantly higher earnings than other men. The education and earnings gains are concentrated among men with poorlyeducated parents -- men who would otherwise stop schooling at relatively low levels. When college proximity is taken as an exogenous determinant of schooling the implied instrumental variables estimates of the return to schooling are 25-60% higher than conventional ordinary least squares estimates.

The relationship between school resources and student achievement has been controversial, in large part because it calls into question a variety of traditional policy approaches. This article reviews the available educational production literature, updating previous summaries. The close to 400 studies of student achievement demonstrate that there is not a strong or consistent relationship between stu-dent performance and school resources, at least after variations in family inputs are taken into ac-count. These results are also reconciled with meta-analytic approaches and with other investigations on how school resources affect labor market outcomes. Simple resource policies hold little hope for improving student outcomes. Reflecting its policy significance, an enormous amount of research has focused on the relationship between resources devoted to schools and student performance. Recent interest generated by current policy debates has helped clarify both the interpretation of this work and the resulting policy implications. This article updates previ-

Many economists and policy makers believe that education creates positive externalities. Indeed, average schooling in U.S. states is highly correlated with state wage levels, even after controlling for the direct e¤ect of schooling on individual wages. We use variation in child labor laws and compulsory attendance laws over time and across states to investigate whether this relationship is causal. Our results show private returns to education that are around 7 percent, and external returns to education that are in the neighbourhood of 1-2 percent and not signi…cantly di¤erent from zero.

This paper disentangles the impact of schools and teachers in influencing achievement with special attention given to the potential problems of omitted or mismeasured variables and of student and school selection. Unique matched panel data from the UTD Texas Schools Project permit the identification of teacher quality based on student performance along with the impact of specific, measured components of teachers and schools. Semiparametric lower bound estimates of the variance in teacher quality based entirely on within-school heterogeneity indicate that teachers have powerful effects on reading and mathematics achievement, though little of the variation in teacher quality is explained by observable characteristics such as education or experience. The results suggest that the effects of a costly ten student reduction in class size are smaller than the benefit of moving one standard deviation up the teacher quality distribution, highlighting the importance of teacher effectiveness in the determination of school quality.

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Policymakers in developing countries have long been troubled by the unde-sirable, but apparently unavoidable, choice between providing broad access to education and developing high-quality schools. Recent evidence, how-ever, suggests that this is a bad way to think about human capital develop-ment. Grade repetition and high dropout rates lead to a significant waste of resources in many school systems. Students in quality schools, however, re-spond in ways that reduce such inefficiencies, perhaps even sufficiently to recoup immediately investments in quality. Promoting high-quality schools, however, is more difficult than many have thought, in part because research demonstrates that the traditional approach to providing quality-simply providing more inputs-is frequently ineffec-tive. Existing inefficiencies are likely to be alleviated only by the introduc-tion of substantially stronger performance incentives in schools and by more extensive experimentation and evaluation of educational programs and school organizations. Incentives, decentralized decisionmaking, and evaluation are alien terms to education, in both industrial and developing countries, but they hold the key to improvement that has eluded policymakers pursuing traditional practices. R ecent research into schooling has begun to point consistently toward education policies that differ sharply from much of what we have seen in the past. In particular, it points more toward performance incentives and less toward regulatory and input-based policies, and it underscores the im-portance of developing high-quality schools, even if this goal appears to impinge on access to schools. Three fundamental findings flow from the new research. First, education around the globe is a very inefficient exercise; strong evidence indicates that too much is being paid for the performance obtained from schools. Second, educa-tion has proved to be a very complicated subject, and available research has

In this paper, we consider two measures of the relative effectiveness of public and Catholic schools: finishing high school and starting college. These measures are potentially more important indicators of school quality than standardized test scores in light of the economic consequences of obtaining more education. Single-equation estimates suggest that for the typical student, attending a Catholic high school raises the probability of finishing high school or entering a four-year college by thirteen percentage points. In bivariate probit models we find almost no evidence that our single-equation estimates are subject to selection bias. I.