EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Money or Grit? Determinants of MisMatch

Russell Cooper

No 22734, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper studies the determinants of mismatch in educational attainment. Mismatch arises when high ability individuals do not obtain a college degree and/or low ability individuals do. Using data from the NLSY97 survey, the paper estimates a structural model of education choice that matches the moments of mismatch, college attainment and labor market outcomes. The analysis conditions on gender, race and socio-economic status. Ignoring the role of parents, mismatch is explained by differences in tastes for education and the presence of occasionally binding borrowing constraints. But parents matter. This channel operates through both the attitudes and ability of offspring. Once these links between parents and children are taken into account, the influence of borrowing constraints disappears. Mismatch reflects variations in tastes as well as noise in test scores, the underlying measure of ability. The paper also presents a decomposition of the college wage premium into the returns to schooling and the selection into higher education. The analysis highlights the power of selection into higher education as an explanation of the college wage premium by gender, race and socio-economic status.

JEL-codes: E21 E24 I21 I23 I26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-gen, nep-lma and nep-mac
Note: ED EFG
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22734.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:22734

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22734

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 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:22734