Using Unemployment Rates as Instruments to Estimate Returns to Schooling
Abstract
I use state unemployment rates during a person’s teenage years to estimate the returns to
schooling. A higher unemployment rate reduces the opportunity costs of attending school.
Using the same 1980 Census data set that Angrist and Krueger (1991) use, I also estimate
returns to schooling with a modified version of their quarter-of-birth instrument. The estimates
from the two-stage least squares (2SLS) model using the unemployment rate and the model
using the quarter-of-birth instruments are almost identical. In addition, these 2SLS estimates
are larger than the ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates, supporting this counterintuitive, yet
prevalent, result in the literature.
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.Collections
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
The labor market returns to a for-profit college education
Cellini, Stephanie Riegg; Chaudhary, Latika (2014);A lengthy literature estimating the returns to education has largely ignored the for-profit sector. In this paper, we estimate the earnings gains to for-profit college attendance using restricted-access data from the ... -
Sonar localization of an autonomous underwater vehicle
Percin, Enis. (Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School, 1993-12);Two different algorithms to navigate an AUV within a charted environment are presented. They use sonar returns and a local map together with the dynamic model to estimate the vehicle's position and acceleration at all ... -
PEO-IWS ACB Insertion Portfolio Optimization
Housel, Tom; Wessman, Mark D.; Mun, Johnathan (Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School, 2010-04-30); NPS-AM-10-069Program Executive Office''Integrated Warfare Systems (PEO-IWS) engaged a team from the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) to conduct a pilot study to apply the Knowledge Valued Added + Real Options + Integrated Risk Management ...