The (Perceived) Returns to Education and the Demand for Schooling

By R. T. Jensen. 2010

198 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Economists emphasize the link between market returns to education and investments in schooling. Though many studies estimate these returns with earnings data, it is the perceived returns that affect schooling decisions, and these perceptions may be inaccurate. Using survey data for eighth-grade boys in the Dominican Republic, we find that the perceived returns to secondary school are extremely low, despite high measured returns. Students at randomly selected schools given information on the higher measured returns completed on average 0.20–0.35 more years of school over the next four years than those who were not.

Subfields: Accounting, Education, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fb9c8925d82ae72201a0d5225ae1932a3affdff7

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Citations in the corpus

Manufacturing Growth and the Lives of Bangladeshi Women (2015, unknown): “…and childbirth we estimate likely also stem from girls in garments-proximate villages choosing to work in factories when they are about 17-23 4 Jensen (2010), Jensen (2012), Nguyen (2008), and Dinkelman and Martinez (2014) conduct randomized controlled trials aimed at changing parents' and…”
Nudging at scale: Experimental evidence from FAFSA completion campaigns (2019, unknown): “We exclude studies that involve informational interventions in earlier grades that focus on shaping students’ college expectations and/or persistence in primary and secondary education (e.g., Dinkleman and Martinez, 2014; Jensen, 2010; McGuigan, McNally, & Wyness, 2016; Nguyen, 2008).”
The short-run and long-run effects of behavioral interventions: Experimental evidence from energy conservation (2014, unknown): “…et al. 2012; John et al. 2011), water conservation (Ferraro, Miranda, and Price 2011; Ferraro and Price 2013), academic performance (Jackson 2010; Jensen 2010; Levitt, List, and Sadoff 2010; Walton and Cohen 2011), voting (Gerber, Green, and Shachar 2003), charitable donations (Landry et al.…”
Inaccurate Statistical Discrimination: An Identification Problem (2019, unknown): “…lack of information, inaccurate beliefs have been shown to exist in a variety of important domains, including the value of human capital formation (Jensen 2010), the prevalence of affirmative action (Kravitz and Platania 1993), and the extent of wealth inequality in the US (Norton and Ariely…”
Educational Choices, Subjective Expectations, and Credit Constraints. NBER Working Paper No. 15087. (2009, unknown): “The two papers closest to ours are Jensen (2008) and Kaufmann (2008). Jensen (2008) inves-”
Parents’ Beliefs about Their Children’s Academic Ability: Implications for Educational Investments (2019, unknown): “…provide information that is di cult or sometimes impossible to obtain, such as the (normally unobservable) economic returns to an activity (e.g., Jensen (2010)), or statistics that require another entity’s private information, such as school-average student performance or normally-unreleased…”
Disclosure: Psychology Changes Everything (2014, unknown): “Research has found that people have systematically biased beliefs about, for example, food calorie content (Bollinger et al. 2011), returns to schooling (Jensen 2010), and the impact on energy consumption of driving cars differing in fuel economy (Allcott 2011).”
The Behavioralist Goes to School: Leveraging Behavioral Economics to Improve Educational Performance. NBER Working Paper No. 18165. (2012, unknown): “These studies have found that increased information and understanding can improve decision-making and outcomes in educational attainment (Jensen, 2010), school achievement (Nguyen, 2008; Bergman, 2012), school choice (Hastings and Weinstein, 2008), college enrollment (Dynarski and Scott-Clayton, 200”
Report Cards: The Impact of Providing School and Child Test Scores on Educational Markets (2014, background): “Given the per-child cost of $1, the cost per marginal child enrolled is $20, a number that compares favorably to one of the lowest cost interventions documented thus far—providing information to parents on the returns to schooling (Jensen, 2010).”