EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Compulsory Education and the Benefits of Schooling

Melvin Stephens and Dou-Yan Yang

No 19369, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Causal estimates of the benefits of increased schooling using U.S. state schooling laws as instruments typically rely on specifications which assume common trends across states in the factors affecting different birth cohorts. Differential changes across states during this period, such as relative school quality improvements, suggest that this assumption may fail to hold. Across a number of outcomes including wages, unemployment, and divorce, we find that statistically significant causal estimates become insignificant and, in many instances, wrong-signed when allowing year of birth effects to vary across regions.

JEL-codes: J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-edu, nep-lab, nep-lma and nep-ure
Note: ED LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published as Melvin Stephens Jr. & Dou-Yan Yang, 2014. "Compulsory Education and the Benefits of Schooling," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(6), pages 1777-92, June.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19369.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Compulsory Education and the Benefits of Schooling (2014) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:19369

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19369

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (wpc@nber.org).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:19369