School Quality and Labor Market Outcomes: Japanese American Internment as a Natural Experiment

To improve the quality and competitiveness of human capital and correspond to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 4 especially target 4.3, to ensure equal access for all women and men to affordable and quality technical, vocational and tertiary education, Indonesia has been focusing on improving the quality of secondary education. However, empirical data and previous research showed that secondary school graduates in Indonesia face high unemployment and income differences, especially vocational school graduates. The quality of secondary high schools plays an important role in determining the years of schooling of the graduates and indirectly impacts labor market outcomes. Using longitudinal panel data at the individual level from the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS) of 2000, 2007, and 2014; and applying education production function and Mincer earning equation, this study finds that the difference in wages between graduates of general and vocational high schools is not statistically significant despite the school quality. However, analyzing within the vocational high schools shows that better quality of vocational high schools increases years of schooling of its graduates as they can access tertiary education, and subsequently increases their performance in the labor market. This finding indicates that policies to improve school quality, especially vocational high schools, should be enhanced.

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The Big Sort: College Reputation and Labor Market Outcomes

American Economic Journal Applied Economics ◽

10.1257/app.20160126 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 9 (3) ◽

pp. 223-261 ◽

Cited By ~ 17

Author(s):

W. Bentley MacLeod ◽

Evan Riehl ◽

Juan E. Saavedra ◽

Miguel Urquiola

Keyword(s):

Labor Market ◽

Administrative Data ◽

Natural Experiment ◽

Labor Market Outcomes ◽

Market Model ◽

Market Outcomes ◽

Earnings Growth ◽

Definition Of ◽

Competitive Labor Market ◽

Simple Definition

We explore how college reputation affects the “big sort,” the process by which students choose colleges and find their first jobs. We incorporate a simple definition of college reputation—graduates' mean admission scores—into a competitive labor market model. This generates a clear prediction: if employers use reputation to set wages, then the introduction of a new measure of individual skill will decrease the return to reputation. Administrative data and a natural experiment from the country of Colombia confirm this. Finally, we show that college reputation is positively correlated with graduates' earnings growth, suggesting that reputation matters beyond signaling individual skill. (JEL I23, I26, J24, J31)

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Does Single-Sex Schooling Help or Hurt Labor Market Outcomes? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in South Korea

SSRN Electronic Journal ◽

10.2139/ssrn.3776875 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Youngju Lee ◽

Nobuhiko Nakazawa

Keyword(s):

Labor Market ◽

South Korea ◽

Natural Experiment ◽

Labor Market Outcomes ◽

Market Outcomes ◽

Single Sex

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How does race operate among Asian Americans in the labor market?: Occupational segregation and different rewards by occupation among native-born Chinese American and Japanese American male workers

Ethnic Studies Review ◽

10.1525/esr.2010.33.1.93 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 33 (1) ◽

pp. 93-129

Author(s):

Chang Won Lee

Keyword(s):

Labor Market ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

Minority Groups ◽

Labor Market Outcomes ◽

Japanese American ◽

Market Outcomes ◽

Class Composition ◽

Racial Gaps ◽

The 1960S

The effect of race in the U.S. labor market has long been controversial. One posits that racial effects have been diminished since the civil rights movement of the 1960s (Alba & Nee, 2003; Sakamoto, Wu, & Tzeng, 2000; Wilson, 1980). Even if some disparities in labor-market outcomes among race groups are found, advocates of this “declining significance of race” thesis do not attribute these disparities to racial discrimination. They, instead, understand the racial gaps as a result of class composition of racial minority groups, classes represented by larger proportions of the working-class population (Wilson, 1980, 1997) as well as unskilled-immigrant workers (Borjas, 1994).

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