Education and Income in the Early Twentieth Century: Evidence from the Prairies

Lawrence Katz and Claudia Goldin

Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics

Abstract: We present the first estimates of the returns to years of schooling before 1940 using a large sample individuals (from the 1915 Iowa State Census). The returns to a year of high school or college were substantial in 1915—about 11 percent for all males and in excess of 12 percent for young males. Education enabled individuals to enter lucrative white-collar jobs, but sizable educational wage differentials also existed within occupational groups. Returns were substantial even for those in farming. We find, using U.S. census data, that returns to education decreased between 1915 and 1940 and again during the 1940s.

Date: 2000
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (64)

Published in Journal of Economic History

Downloads: (external link)
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2766688/katz_edu.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Education and Income in the Early Twentieth Century: Evidence from the Prairies (2000)
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:hrv:faseco:2766688

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Office for Scholarly Communication ().