EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Earnings, Schooling, and Ability Revisited

David Card

No 710, Working Papers from Princeton University, Department of Economics, Industrial Relations Section.

Abstract: This paper presents a survey and interpretation of recent research on the return to education. The empirical findings in a series of current papers suggest that the causal effect of education on earnings is understated by standard estimation methods. Using a simple model of optimal schooling developed by Gary Becker (1967), I derive an explicit formula for the conventional estimate of the return to schooling and for alternative instrumental variables and fixed-effects estimators. The analysis suggests that instrumental variables estimates based on "interventions" that affect the schooling choices of children from relatively disadvantaged family backgrounds will tend to exceed the corresponding OLS estimates.

Keywords: returns to education; ability bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1994-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (97)

Downloads: (external link)
https://dataspace.princeton.edu/bitstream/88435/dsp01rb68xb85z/1/331.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Internal Server Error

Related works:
Working Paper: Earnings, Schooling, and Ability Revisited (1994) 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:pri:indrel:331

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Princeton University, Department of Economics, Industrial Relations Section. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bobray Bordelon (bordelon@princeton.edu).

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:pri:indrel:331