A half a century has passed since the landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education (1954) overturned the doctrine of separate but equal in the realm of public education. This chapter attempts to summarize what we know about the impact of Brown on enrollment patterns and academic and economic...

The theoretical, conceptual, and practical difficulties with the use of cross-national data on schooling are so severe using aggregate data for any purpose for which individual level data would do should be avoided. There are, however, three questions for which the use of cross-national data on...

This paper presents economic models of child development that capture the essence of recent findings from the empirical literature on skill formation. The goal of this essay is to provide a theoretical framework for interpreting the evidence from a vast empirical literature, for guiding the next...

This chapter explores the effects of education on nonmarket outcomes from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Examples of outcomes considered include general consumption patterns at a moment in time, savings and the rate of growth of consumption over time, own (adult) health and inputs...

Numerous studies regress log earnings on schooling and report estimated coefficients as "Mincer rates of return". A more recent literature uses instrumental variables. This chapter considers the economic interpretation of these analyses and how the availability of repeated cross section and...

This chapter analyzes the international evidence on the relationship between educational wage premia and the distribution of personal labor earnings. The aim is to review what is known about the contribution of differences in relative wages across schooling levels to the degree of variability,...

We review basic facts about higher education finance in the United States and analytical, empirical and policy issues in that realm. Examining trends in higher education finance, we demonstrate growth in the share of revenues provided by government up to about 1980, with a steady decline...

This chapter examines the literature that attempts to measure the relationship between labor earnings and the average quality of a state's elementary and secondary schools where school quality is approximated by statewide average characteristics like the teacher-pupil ratio. We present evidence...

Although there is intense policy interest in improving educational outcomes around the world, there is much greater uncertainty about how to accomplish this. The primary governmental decisions often relate to the resources that are devoted to schooling, but the research indicates little...

All data sources indicate that black-white skill gaps diminished over most of the 20th century, but black-white skill gaps as measured by test scores among youth and educational attainment among young adults have remained constant or increased in absolute value since the late 1980s. I examine...