The main goal of this dissertation is to estimate the social return to education. Understanding
the magnitude of this return is key to assessing the efficiency of public investment in …

Economists have speculated for at least a century that the social return to education may
exceed the private return. In this paper, I estimate spillovers from college education by …

Study of the “returns to education” has been one of the most productive areas of research in
labor economics for the last seven decades, and it is very likely that it will continue to be a …

The social return to education may exceed the private return if there are externalities. In this
paper, I estimate externalities from education by comparing wages for otherwise similar …

Private and social returns to education may differ in the presence of externalities. In this
paper, I estimate the external return to education by comparing wages for otherwise similar …

The literature estimating returns to education has often utilized spousal education and
parental education as instrument variables (IV). However, due to usual survey designs, both …

In this paper we focus on education as a private decision to invest in “human capital” and the
estimation of the rate of return to that private investment. While the literature is replete with …

The idea of positive educational externalities is that the benefits of individually acquired
education may not be restricted to the individual but might spill over to others as well …

Over the last few decades, considerable research effort has been devoted to the
measurement of the private individual returns to education, namely the individual wage gain …

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 …