Class Size, Education, and Wages

By Christian Dustmann, N. Rajah, A. Soest. Social Science Research Network, 2003

140 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use micro data for England and Wales to examine the effects of class size on the decision to stay on in full time schooling at 16 and on wages later in life. We find that class size has a sizeable and significant effect on the decision to stay on. This finding is very robust. Wage equations show the effect of staying on is significantly positive for wages. Combining this with the effect of class size on the staying on decision, reveals that class size significantly affects future wages. Reduced form models lead to much less accurate and insignificant estimates. The impact of school quality on academic performance and other outcomes has been subject to much scrutiny, both within the academic literature and in political circles. The last three and a half decades have spawned a vast number of studies on the relationship between smaller class sizes and learning, much of which is based on data from the US; see for example, Coleman et al. (1966), Betts (1995),

Subfields: Education, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a3241a98093f1d823ea05f9a81a4779518b25017

Citations in the corpus

• Long-Term Effects of Class Size (2013, unknown): “, 2011), unavailability of directly linked data on labor market outcomes (Krueger, 2003; Schanzenbach, 2007), or strong identifying assumptions (Dearden et al., 2002; Dustmann et al., 2003).”
• ON T HE SPECIFICATION A ND ESTIMATION OF T HE PRODUCTION F UNCTION F OR COGNITIVE ACHIEVEMENT (2003, unknown): “1 For an example of a richer dataset that includes information both about school and family inputs, see Dustmann et al. (2003). The Economic Journal, 113 (February), F3–F33.”