SCHOOL RESOURCES AND STUDENT OUTCOMES

In this article, David Card and Alan Krueger review the literature exa mining how school resources affect students' educational attainment an d earnings. After addressing the challenges that researchers face in s tudying such a connection, the authors describe the theoretical framew ork they used to interpret the literature on schooling, school quality , and earnings. The framework is guided by four propositions: that ear nings rise with educational attainment; that the marginal payoff to ad ditional schooling is higher for those who attend quality schools; tha t, if the monetary payoff to an additional year of schooling rises, so me students will attend school longer; and that a portion of the obser ved association between earnings and education is due to unobserved fa ctors. After an account of the empirical findings in these studies, th e authors conclude that there is some evidence that school resources a ffect earnings and educational attainment, although much uncertainty r emains in the literature.