This paper examines the effect of teacher relative wages and teacher wage dispersion on high school graduates' preferences for teaching majors in College. This approximation to teacher quality is appropriate in a country like Venezuela as opposed to the US since the rigidity of the tertiary school system significantly limits mobility between…

Recent economic research has investigated the extent to which involvement in school-sponsored clubs and sports constitutes human capital investment. Through instrumental variables, the existing literature focuses on identifying long-term impacts in terms of educational attainment and wages. Instead, I use a fixed effects strategy to test whether…

This study uses the admission scores of Taiwan's Joint College Entrance Examination (JCEE) and occupational wage data to estimate the reputation values of engineering and medical schools in Taiwan. It is found that the reputation values of medical schools are more than twice those of engineering schools. It takes about 7 and 19 years of work for…

Compares the distribution of test scores at age 13 in 1964 and 1982 and wages later in life across 11 countries. Finds that wage dispersion later in life is never greater than test-score dispersion. For three countries (U.S., UK, and Japan), finds evidence of skill-biased changes in wage dispersion between the early 1970s and the late 1980s.…

Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, this article investigates whether students who made relatively large test score gains during high school had larger earnings 7 years after high school compared to students whose scores improved little. In models that control for pre-high school test scores, family background, and…

The paper assesses the effects of offering upper-secondary students the opportunity to pursue vocational education in high school on completion rates and subsequent earnings. Analysis of international cross-section data found that nations enrolling a large proportion of upper-secondary students in vocational programs have significantly higher…

Previous research has suggested that skills reflected in test-score performance on tests such as the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) can account for some of the racial differences in average wages. I use a more complete set of test scores available with the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Cohort to reconsider this evidence, and…