Gender Differences in Completed Schooling

Kerwin Kofi Charles and Ming-Ching Luoh ()

No 9028, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper summarizes the dramatic changes in relative male-females educational attainment over the past three decades. Stock measures of education among the entire adult population show rising attainment levels for both men and women, with men enjoying an advantage in schooling levels throughout this interval. Cohort specific analysis reveals that these stock measures mask two interesting patterns: (a) gender difference at the cohort level had vanished by the early 1950 birth cohort and reversed sign ever since; (b) for several cohorts, attainment rates were flat for women and flat and falling for men. This last is puzzling in the face of the large college premia that these cohorts observed when making their schooling choices. We present a simple human capital model showing how the anticipated dispersion of future wages should affect educational investment and find that a model which includes measures of future earnings dispersion fits the data for relative schooling patterns quite well.

JEL-codes: I20 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published as Charles, Kerwin Kofi and Ming-Ching Luoh. "Gender Differences In Completed Schooling," Review of Economics and Statistics, 2003, v85(3,Aug), 559-577.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9028.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:9028

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9028

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 ().