School quality and wages
This dissertation examines the literature that attempts to measure the relationship between school quality and earnings. I begin by developing a simple economic model that predicts that, everything else being equal and with comparisons being made within a market, workers from higher quality schools...
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| Format: | Others |
| Language: | en_US |
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Texas A&M University
2007
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/4883 |
| Summary: | This dissertation examines the literature that attempts to measure the relationship
between school quality and earnings. I begin by developing a simple economic model
that predicts that, everything else being equal and with comparisons being made within a
market, workers from higher quality schools will have higher earnings among those with
the same level of schooling and they will have steeper schooling-earnings gradients.
The remainder of this dissertation explores problems that exist in this literature for
which no solutions have been presented. These problems include: 1) there doesnâÂÂt have
to be a direct and positive relationship between school quality and earnings; 2) the data
suggest that school quality measures are frequently mismatched to workers; 3) most
school quality studies include college-trained labor while completely ignoring the
quality of the college attended; 4) the omission of college quality from the estimation is
especially problematic for studies that attempt to measure the school quality-earnings
relationship through differences in schooling-earnings gradients for those educated in
different systems; 5) state of birth wage rankings thought to capture a school quality
effect are not invariant to the market (state of residence) in which they are evaluated;
and 6) the evidence presented herein suggests that interstate migration is selective.
These problems undermine the credibility of existing estimates of a school qualityearnings
relationship. |
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