The internal rate of return to schooling is a fundamental economic parameter that is often used to assess whether expenditure on education should be increased or decreased. This paper considers alternative approaches to estimating marginal internal rates of return for different schooling levels....

This paper uses information from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) and Displaced Worker Surveys (DWS) to provide evidence on the source of human capital specificity. Measures of four basic skills are constructed from the detailed DOT information. These measures are used to characterize...

Separate identification of the price and quantity of human capital has important implications for understanding key issues in labor economics and macroeconomics. Price and quantity series are derived and subjected to robustness checks. The human capital price series associated with different...

We develop a human capital model with borrowing constraints explicitly derived from government student loan programs and private lending under limited commitment. Two key implications of our analysis are: (i) binding constraints may not depress investment; and (ii) a positive relationship...

Taking advantage of unique longitudinal data, we provide the first characterization of what college students believe at the time of entrance about their final major, relate these beliefs to actual major outcomes, and, provide an understanding of why students hold the initial beliefs about majors...

In an effort to explain the observed heterogeneity in the exporting decisions of rms, the empirical trade literature has concluded that exporting rms are more productive than non-exporting rms. In this paper, I show that the foundation for this conclusion is weak, given that the productivity...

The substantial shift in rural schooling levels and the contemporaneous changes in educational finance policy including tax and fees reform, two exempt and one compensation policy and school rearrangement policy, raise the need for a fresh look at the determinants of rural education. In this...

A serious difficulty in determining the importance of credit constraints in education arises because standard data sources do not provide a direct way of identifying which students are credit constrained. This paper differentiates itself from previous work by taking a direct approach for...