EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Class Size, Education and Wages

Christian Dustmann, Arthur van Soest () and Najma Rajah

No 3397, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: This Paper examines the effects of class size on the decision to stay on in full time schooling at the age of 16 and on wages at later stages in life. Little research exists on the effect of school quality on career decisions, although it has potentially important long-term implications. We use micro data for England and Wales that contain an unusually rich set of variables on parental background and previous achievements. We find that class size, measured as the pupil-teacher ratio at the school level, has a sizeable and significant effect on the decision to remain in full time education beyond the minimum age. This finding is very robust and persists when school type variables, exam results, and results from past ability tests are controlled for. We also estimate wage equations including the staying on decision at age 16 as one of the explanatory variables. The effect of staying on is significantly positive for wages at age 33 and age 42,and for females also at age 23.Combining this effect with the effect of class size on the staying on decision, our results reveal that class size significantly affects future wages. Reduced form models in which wages are directly regressed on class size lead to much less accurate and generally insignificant estimates.

Keywords: School inputs; Educational attainment; Training (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C35 I20 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP3397 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Class Size, Education, and Wages (2003)
Working Paper: Class Size, Education, and Wages (2002) 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:cpr:ceprdp:3397

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP3397

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-23
Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:3397