Researchers using cross-sectional data have failed to produce systematic evidence that teacher salaries affect student outcomes. These studies generally do not account for non-pecuniary job attributes and alternative wage opportunities, which affect the opportunity cost of choosing to teach....

This paper explores a little understood aspect of labor markets, their spatial geography. Using data from New York State, we find teacher labor markets to be geographically very small. Teachers express preferences to teach close to where they grew up and, controlling for proximity, they prefer...

This paper acknowledges that the relationship between log wages and schooling is considerably more complex than the simple human capital earnings function suggests and that schooling is endogenous. We estimate a model where educational attainment is discrete and ordered and log wages are...

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 studies that estimate the rate of return using regression methods where the estimated return is...

Using a large and novel administrative dataset, this paper investigates variation in returnsto different higher education 'degrees' (subject-institution combinations) in the United King-dom. Conditioning on a rich set background characteristics, it finds substantial variation inreturns, even...

This paper uses UK data to estimate the returns to schooling. We address the endogeneity of schooling by exploiting the experimental nature of two changes in the minimum school leaving age to instrument eduction. The corrected estimates of the return to education indicate the presence of a large...

Using a large and novel administrative dataset, this paper investigates variation in returnsto different higher education ‘degrees’ (subject-institution combinations) in the United King-dom. Conditioning on a rich set background characteristics, it finds substantial variation inreturns, even...