This paper estimates the rate of return to the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program, an early intervention program targeted toward disadvantaged African-American youth. Estimates of the rate of return to the Perry program are widely cited to support the claim of substantial economic benefits from...

We examine how the racial wealth gap interacts with financial aid in American higher education to generate a disparate impact on college access and outcomes. Retirement savings and home equity are excluded from the formula used to estimate the amount a family can afford to pay. All else equal,...

A primary rationale for public provision of K-12 education and state financing of school spending is that education fosters civic engagement and the development of social capital. However, limited evidence exists on whether and how school spending affects civic engagement. Virtually all studies...

Recent attention to the causal identification of spending impacts provides improved estimates of spending outcomes in a variety of circumstances, but the estimates are substantially different across studies. Half of the variation in estimated funding impact on test scores and over three-quarters...

This paper utilizes the self-employed to analyze the observed increase in the educational earnings premium in the 1980's. The paper compares the predictions of the signaling and human capital models in response to an exogenous demand shock such as a skill-biased technological change. Since the...

Indicators for quality of schooling are not only relatively new in the world but also unavailable for a sizable share of the world's population. In their absence, some proxy measures have been devised. One simple but powerful idea has been to use the schooling premium for migrant workers in the...

The paper reexamines the employer size-wage puzzle using NLSY79 data. The empirical results show that even for those who never receive any training from their employers, size-wage premium still exists and is quantitatively important. Wage increases associated with receiving on-the-job training...

Over the past two decades, technological progress has been biased towards making skilled labor more productive. What does skill-biased technological change imply for business cycles? To answer this question, we construct a quarterly series for the skill premium from the CPS and use it to...

This paper examines whether the results of the earnings equation developed in the overeducation/required eduation/under-education (ORU) literature are sensitive to whether the usual or reference levels of education are measured using the Realized Matches or Worker Self-Assessment methods. The...

This paper examines the way immigrant earnings are determined in Australia. It uses the overeducation/required education/undereducation (ORU) framework (Hartog, 2000) and a decomposition of the native-born/foreign-born differential in the payoff to schooling developed by Chiswick and Miller...