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Title: Returns to High School Quality: College Choice and Earnings
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Strayer, Wayne Earle |
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Returns to High School Quality: College Choice and Earnings Ph.D. Dissertation, The Ohio State University, 1997 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: UMI - University Microfilms, Bell and Howell Information and Learning Keyword(s): Colleges; Earnings; Education, Secondary; High School; Higher Education; Human Capital; Modeling; School Quality; Schooling; Simultaneity; Wage Growth Despite thirty years of research on the subject, it remains unclear whether high school quality affects labor market earnings. Existing studies typically rely on reduced form wage equations with quality measures among the regressors to assess the impact of school quality on wages. School quality is assumed to represent a dimension of human capital and, therefore, to influence wages in the same manner as time spent in school (school quantity). My study extends the previous research on school quality by focusing on the structural effects of high school quality on labor market earnings. I specify a model of simultaneous college choice and earnings determination that captures two separate effects of school quality on earnings. First, measured high school quality affects a graduating high school student's choice of college. College choice, in turn, affects the individual's post school earnings. Second, the additional skills accumulated via a higher quality high school translate into higher future wages. Modelling the college choice jointly with the wage process identifies both of these important effects and eliminates selection bias inherent in studies that ignore the college choice. In the econometric specification of my model, the unobserved components associated with each college alternative as well as the wage process are permitted to covary, allowing for greater behavioral generality and avoiding the "independence of irrelevant alternatives" assumption commonly made in multinomial discrete choice models. The use of a recently developed simulation method allows me to estimate my model without calculating the prohibitive multidimensional integrals necessary for standard maximum likelihood analysis with non-independent error distributions. My study is one of the first applications of this simulation method in the literature on school choice. For estimation, I use a unique data set that combines the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Database. The data set includes extensive information on personal and family characteristics, schooling, and labor market experiences for a sample of approximately 5,000 high school graduates born in 1957-64. In addition, it has detailed information on the high schools and colleges attended by these individuals. |
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Bibliography Citation
Strayer, Wayne Earle. Returns to High School Quality: College Choice and Earnings. Ph.D. Dissertation, The Ohio State University, 1997. |