We estimate the monetary return to attending a highly selective college using the College and Beyond (C&B) Survey linked to Detailed Earnings Records from the Social Security Administration (SSA). This paper extends earlier work by Dale and Krueger (2002) that examined the relationship between...

This paper uses a new survey to contrast the wages of genetically identical twins with different schooling levels. Multiple measurements of schooling levels were also collected to assess the effect of reporting error on the estimated economic returns to schooling. The data indicate that omitted...

There are many estimates of the effect of college quality on students' subsequent earnings. One difficulty interpreting past estimates, however, is that elite colleges admit students, in part, based on characteristics that are related to their earnings capacity. Since some of these...

This paper presents an overview and interpretation of the literature relating school quality to students' subsequent labor market success. We begin with a simple theoretical model that describes the determination of schooling and earnings with varying school quality. A key insight of the model...

This paper tries to reconcile evidence from the microeconometric and empirical macro growth literatures on the effect of schooling on income and GDP growth. Much microeconometric evidence suggest that education is an important causal determinant of income for individuals within countries. At a...

This paper examines evidence on the effect of class size on student achievement. First, it is shown that results of quantitative summaries of the literature, such as Hanushek (1997), depend critically on whether studies are accorded equal weight. Hanushek summarizes 277 estimates extracted from...

This study examines the extent and influence of occupational licensing in the U.S. using a specially designed national labor force survey. Specifically, we provide new ways of measuring occupational licensing and consider what types of regulatory requirements and what level of government...

This paper uses job applications- data to test the existence of non-competitive, ex-ante rents in the labor market. We first examine whether jobs that pay the legal minimum wage face an excessively of labor as measured by the number of job applications received for the most recent positions...

This paper reviews available evidence on the inter-industry wage structure. The inter-industry wage structure is remarkably similar in different eras, in different countries, and among different types of workers. Industries with high capital-to-labor ratios, monopoly power and high profits pay...

Some workers bargain with prospective employers before accepting a job. Others face a posted wage as a take-it-or-leave-it opportunity. Theories of wage formation point to substantial differences in labor-market equilibrium between bargained and posted wages. We surveyed a representative sample...