How Large are the Social Returns to Education? Evidence from Compulsory Schooling Laws

Daron Acemoglu and Joshua Angrist

No 7444, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Average schooling in US states is highly correlated with state wage levels, even after controlling for the direct effect of schooling on individual wages. We use an instrumental variables strategy to determine whether this relationship is driven by social returns to education. The instrumentals for average schooling are derived from information on the child labor laws and compulsory attendance laws that affected men in our Census samples, while quarter of birth is used as an instrument for individual schooling. This results in precisely estimated private returns to education of about seven percent, and small social returns, typically less than one percent, that are not significantly different from zero.

JEL-codes: I20 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-pub
Note: EFG LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (163)

Published as Acemoglu, D. (ed.) Recent Developments in Growth Theory. Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 2004.
Published as How Large Are Human Capital Externalities? Evidence from Compulsory Schooling Laws , Daron Acemoglu, Joshua Angrist. in NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2000, Volume 15 , Bernanke and Rogoff. 2001

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7444.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: How Large are the Social Returns to Education? Evidence from Compulsory Schooling Laws (1999)
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:7444

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7444

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 ().