The article measures the impact of high school resources on women’s educational attainment and earnings. No link emerges between education and school resources—as measured by the pupil‐teacher ratio, spending per pupil, teachers’ starting salaries, or books per student. For white women, no significant connection between school resources and wages is found. But school inputs are in several cases significantly and positively related to black women’s wages. Wage elasticities with respect to school inputs are uniformly larger for black women. Finally, the impact of school resources on earnings remains constant or in some cases weakens as workers grow older.

The paper tests whether technological change has been neutral in Canadian manufacturing industries, using a system of translog cost share equations for 1962 through 1986. The model features two classes of labor treated as distinct inputs. Tests rejected homotheticity in all industries. Hicks neutrality was also rejected in 16 of 18 industries. The most common pattern of nonneutral technical change was a bias away from blue-collar workers. Formal tests for skill-neutral innovation rejected the hypothesis in ten industries in favor of skill-using technical change. The results suggest that in studies of Canadian manufacturing, aggregation across labor inputs is inappropriate.

The literature which examines the impact of school spending on students' subsequent earnings is bifurcated into state-level studies, which typically find strong effects, and school-level studies,which find little effect. Since most of the school-level studies examine young workers, one explanation for the discrepancy is that school inputs benefit workers only as they gain job experience. The paper tests the hypothesis by using both school-level (NLSY) and state-level data sources (Census and the Biennial Survey of Education). Both data-sets suggest that there is typically no significant age dependence. Thus other explanations of the discrepancy are likely to explain the differing results. JEL Codes: I21, I24 1 1. Introduction Education is arguably one of the best long term public investments available to a society. It is widely accepted that the private returns to an additional year of education are quite high, and that the social returns are also high. Such beliefs form the basis ...

The paper searches for links between school quaity and subsequent earnings of students. Using data for white males from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the paper rejects the hypothesis that workers' earnings are independent of which high school they attended. However, traditional measures of school 'quality' such as class size, teachers' salaries and teachers' level of education fail to capture these differences. This result is robust to changes in specification and subsample. The paper contrasts the results with those of D. Card and A. B. Krueger (1992) and speculates that structural changes may have weakened the link between traditional measures of school quality and student outcomes.

The literature on educational standards suggests that an increase in graduation requirements heightens inequality, since achievement rises only for the best students. The paper derives a different conclusion based on a model featuring workers with heterogeneous abilities. Higher educational standards, while increasing inequality, can increase the earnings of both the most able and the least able workers. Thus an egalitarian social planner may set higher standards than an income-maximizing social planner. The egalitarian planner may prefer more strict standards because they come closer to creating a pooling equilibrium. The results mitigate the concern that higher standards are necessarily inegalitarian. JEL Codes: I20, J24, J31 1 The Impact of Educational Standards on the Level and Distribution of Earnings In recent years, the role of standards in improving the quality of public education has received considerable attention from economists. Recent examples include Robert M. Costrel...

We estimate the effect that six types of high school math courses have on students' earnings nearly a decade after graduation. We use High School and Beyond transcript data to differentiate courses at a more detailed level than in previous research. This enables us to show that more-advanced courses have larger effects than less-advanced ones. We also provide evidence that math courses can help close the earnings gap between students from low-income and middle-income families. Finally, by incorporating other academic subjects, we demonstrate how specific course combinations can explain the earnings premium related to an additional year of school.