The Civic Returns to Education

Thomas Dee

The putative effects of education on the quality and quantity of democratic participation provide a primary motivation for the public institutions and policies that promote universal access to education in the United States. In particular, it is widely thought that increased schooling creates both a willingness to participate in democratic processes as well as an ability to do so in a more informed manner. However, the prior evidence linking schooling and civic behaviors does not address the fundamentally important issue of distinguishing the hypothesized causal effects of education from potentially specious correlations and the influence of measurement error in reported schooling. This study proposes to identify the causal effect of increased schooling on a variety of adult civic behaviors and knowledge as well as how these returns may vary by gender, race, ethnicity and birth cohort. The proposed research design will exploit the empirical strategies refined in the extensive, labor-economics literature on the effects of schooling on earnings. Specifically, this study will identify the causal effects of schooling on adult civic behaviors and knowledge by tracing the effects of several plausibly exogenous sources of variation in individual schooling. These "natural experiments" include the within-state variation across different birth cohorts in youth exposure to compulsory school attendance laws, child labor laws, post-secondary tuition levels and local labor market conditions.

About Thomas Dee

Thomas S. Dee is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA and a Faculty Research Fellow with the Program on Children and the Health Economics Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA. He will spend the 2002-2003 academic year as visiting faculty at Princeton University's Education Research Section. His research focuses on policy-relevant issues in public finance and the economics of education and health. Recent examples include an evaluation of how the "first wave" of state-level education reforms influenced a variety of student outcomes and a study of whether the racial pairing of students and teachers influences student achievement. His research has been published in several academic journals including Economic Inquiry, the Journal of Labor Economics, the Journal of Human Resources, Health Economics, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the Journal of Law and Economics, the Journal of Health Economics, the Southern Economic Journal, the Journal of Public Economics and Economics of Education Review. Professor Dee received a Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from the University of Maryland and a B.A. in Economics from Swarthmore College.