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Does School Quality Matter? Returns to Education and the Characteristics of Public Schools in the United States
Abstract
This paper estimates the effects of school quality--measured by the pupil/teacher ratio, average term length, and relative teacher pay--on the rate of return to education for men born between 1920 and 1949. Using earnings data from the 1980 census, we find that men who were educated in states with higher-quality schools have a higher return to additional years of schooling. Rates of return are also higher for individuals from states with better-educated teachers and with a higher fraction of female teachers. Holding constant school quality measures, however, we find no evidence that parental income or education affects average state-level rates of return.
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Citations
Cited by
Duflo, E. (2001) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/aer.91.4.795 · Cited by 1,940
Assessing the Effects of School Resources on Student Performance: An Update
Hanushek, E. A. (1997) · Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis · doi:10.3102/01623737019002141 · Cited by 1,612
Angrist, J. D., & Pischke, J.-S. (2010) · Journal of Economic Perspectives · doi:10.1257/jep.24.2.3 · Cited by 1,566
The Relationship Between Education and Adult Mortality in the United States
Lleras-Muney, A. (2005) · Review of Economic Studies · doi:10.1111/0034-6527.00329 · Cited by 1,282
The Productivity Argument for Investing in Young Children
Heckman, J. J., & Masterov, D. V. (2007) · Review of Agricultural Economics · doi:10.1111/j.1467-9353.2007.00359.x · Cited by 1,217
Metadata
- Authors
- Card, D., & Krueger, A. B.
- Venue
- Journal of Political Economy
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 1992-02
- Volume
- 100
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 1-40
- ISSN
- 0022-3808 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-534X
- OpenAlex
- W2260600530
- Cited by
- 1,163
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 100.29
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Does School Quality Matter? Returns to Education and the Characteristics of Public Schools in the United States. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/261805
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- Card, D., & Krueger, A. B. (1992). Does School Quality Matter? Returns to Education and the Characteristics of Public Schools in the United States. Journal of Political Economy. https://doi.org/10.1086/261805
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
