This paper uses administrative earnings data to the effect of attending a highly selective college on future earnings. It extends the work of a previous paper—that examined the 1995 earnings of a cohort of students who entered college in 1976. Using earnings data from a longer time...

This paper uses administrative earnings data to the effect of attending a highly selective college on future earnings. It extends the work of a previous paper—that examined the 1995 earnings of a cohort of students who entered college in 1976. Using earnings data from a longer time...

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.

Two-stage-least-squares (2SLS) estimates are biased towards OLS estimates. This bias grows with the degree of over-identification and can generate highly misleading results. In this paper we propose two simple alternatives to 2SLS and limited-information-maximum-likelihood (LIML) estimators for...

Instrumental Variables (IV) estimates tend to be biased in the same direction as Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) in finite samples if the instruments are weak. To address this problem we propose a new IV estimator which we call Split Sample Instrumental Variables (SSIV). SSIV works as follows: we...