TY  - JOUR
AU  - Card,David
AU  - Krueger,Alan B.
TI  - Labor Market Effects of School Quality: Theory and Evidence
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 5450
PY  - 1996
Y2  - February 1996
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5450
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5450.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
David Card
Department of Economics
549 Evans Hall, #3880
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA  94720-3880
Tel: 510/642-5222
Fax: 510/643-7042
E-Mail: card@econ.berkeley.edu

Alan B. Krueger
Industrial Relations Section
Firestone Library
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
Tel: 609/258-4046
Fax: 609/258-2907
E-Mail: akrueger@princeton.edu
AB  - 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 is that changes in school quality may affect the characteristics of individuals who choose each level of schooling, imparting a potential selection bias to comparisons of earnings conditional on education.  We then summarize the literature that relates school resources to students' earnings and educational attainment.  A variety of evidence suggests that students who were educated in schools with more resources tend to earn more and have higher schooling.  We also discuss two important issues in the literature: the tradeoffs involved in using school-level versus more aggregated (district or state-level) quality measures; and the evidence on school quality effects for African Americans educated in the segregated school systems of the South.
ER  -