TY  - JOUR
AU  - Acemoglu,Daron
AU  - Angrist,Joshua
TI  - How Large are the Social Returns to Education?  Evidence from Compulsory Schooling Laws
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 7444
PY  - 1999
Y2  - December 1999
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7444
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7444.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Daron Acemoglu
Department of Economics
MIT, E52-380B
50 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA  02142-1347
Tel: 617/253-1927
Fax: 617/253-1330
E-Mail: daron@mit.edu

Joshua Angrist
Department of Economics
MIT, E52-353
50 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA  02142-1347
Tel: 617/253-8909
Fax: 617/253-1330
E-Mail: angrist@mit.edu
M1  - published as Daron Acemoglu, Joshua Angrist. "How Large are Human-Capital Externalities? Evidence from Compulsory-Schooling Laws," in Ben S. Bernanke and Kenneth Rogoff, editors, "NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2000, Volume 15" MIT PRess (2001)

AB  - Average schooling in US states is highly correlated with state wage levels, even after controlling for the direct effect of schooling on individual wages.  We use an instrumental variables strategy to determine whether this relationship is driven by social returns to education.  The instrumentals for average schooling are derived from information on the child labor laws and compulsory attendance laws that affected men in our Census samples, while quarter of birth is used as an instrument for individual schooling.  This results in precisely estimated private returns to education of about seven percent, and small social returns, typically less than one percent, that are not significantly different from zero.
ER  -