This dissertation examines the literature that attempts to measure the relationship
between school quality and earnings. I begin by developing a simple economic model
that predicts that, everything else being equal and with comparisons being made within a
market, workers from higher quality schools will have higher earnings among those with
the same level of schooling and they will have steeper schooling-earnings gradients.
The remainder of this dissertation explores problems that exist in this literature for
which no solutions have been presented. These problems include: 1) there doesnâÂÂt have
to be a direct and positive relationship between school quality and earnings; 2) the data
suggest that school quality measures are frequently mismatched to workers; 3) most
school quality studies include college-trained labor while completely ignoring the
quality of the college attended; 4) the omission of college quality from the estimation is
especially problematic for studies that attempt to measure the school quality-earnings
relationship through differences in schooling-earnings gradients for those educated in
different systems; 5) state of birth wage rankings thought to capture a school quality
effect are not invariant to the market (state of residence) in which they are evaluated;
and 6) the evidence presented herein suggests that interstate migration is selective.
These problems undermine the credibility of existing estimates of a school qualityearnings
relationship.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/4883 |
| Date | 25 April 2007 |
| Creators | Speakman, Robert B., Jr. |
| Contributors | Welch, Finis |
| Publisher | Texas A&M University |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | 544053 bytes, electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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