The quality of schooling, especially of public high schools, and the role of parents have been a focus of public policy in recent years. Schooling and parents are important in developing human resources that will contribute to society and the economy. Clarifying the links among parental influences, schooling quality and labor market performance is essential in developing sound policies. The two essays comprising this dissertation examine these issues using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort (NLSY79).
The first essay uses quantile regressions to evaluate the diverse returns to different types of school quality accruing to people who are at different positions in the wage distribution. Using data from the geocoded version of the NLSY79, I find that teachers with advanced degrees and better-paid teachers have significantly larger benefits for individuals at higher quantiles of the wage distribution, while a high teacher/student ratio favors individuals at lower quantiles. These results are consistent across a variety of samples and specifications. While adopting different measures of student outcomes, this work reaches a conclusion that is similar to research in education - the estimated effects of school quality are misleadingly small when the average effect is considered. I argue that a correct question to ask is for whom school quality matters.
The second essay estimates how parents affect their children's achievement by transmitting their preferences to their children. The model developed in the paper demonstrates that children whose parents have higher expectations for their achievement spend more time studying conditional on their ability and previous achievement, and thus learn more. Using data from the NLSY79 Child & Young Adult surveys, I construct a variable measuring parental expectations for children's educational attainment. These data are then linked to the summary tape files of 1990 Census and the Common Core of Data to obtain a unique data set on the characteristics of the neighborhoods and school districts where the NLSY79 children live. After controlling for a comprehensive set of characteristics of the children's mother, family, neighborhood, and school, I find a positive and significant effect of parental expectations on child learning.