NBER WORKING PAPERS SERIES ESTIMATING THE PAYOFF TO SCHOOLING USING THE VIETNAM-ERA DRAFT LOTTERY Joshua D. Angrist Alan B. Krueger Working Paper No. 4067 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 May 1992 We are grateful to Kevin McCormick, Ronald Tucker, and Greg Weyland for creating a special Current Population Survey extract for us. We are also grateful to Dean Hyslop for excellent research assistance and to Michael Boozer for helpful comments. The data used in this paper will be made available to other researchers. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, Grant No. SES-9012149. This paper is part of NBER’s research program in Labor Studies. Any opinions expressed are those of the authors and not those of the National Bureau of Economic Research.NBER Working Paper #4067 May 1992 ESTIMATING THE PAYOFF TO SCHOOLING USING THE VIETNAM-ERA DRAFT LOTTERY ABSTRACT Between 1970 and 1973 priority for military service was randomly assigned to draft-age men in a series of lotteries. Many men who were at risk of being drafted managed to avoid military service by enrolling in school and obtaining an educational deferment. This paper uses the draft lottery as a natural experiment to estimate the return to education and the veteran premium. Estimates are based on special extracts of the Current Population Survey for 1979 and 1981-85. The results suggest that an extra year of schooling acquired in response to the lottery is associated with 6.6 percent higher weekly earnings. This figure is about 10 percent higher than the OLS estimate of the return to education in this sample, which suggests there is omitted-variable bias in conventional estimates of the return to education. Our findings are robust to a variety of assumptions about the effect of veteran status on earnings. Joshua D. Angrist Alan B. Krueger Economics Department Economics Department Hebrew University Princeton University Jerusalem 91905 Princeton, NJ 08544 Israel and NBER and NBERFor many years economists have sought to estimate the monetary retum to education without bias from omitted variables that are correlated with educational attainment and with earnings capacity (see Griliches (1977) for a survey of this literature). A positive bias would arise, for example, if individuals with higher earnings capacity obtain more schooling. A variety of econometric techniques have been applied to try to overcome this problem, but the magnitude and importance of omitted-variable bias in the estimated return to education is still an unanswered question. Willis (1986; p. 589), for example, concludes that, "Given the complexity of the issues and the non- representative character of the data sets that have been employed in the literature on ability bias, it is difficult to reach any firm conclusion about the magnitude or even the direction of the bias..." Concern over potential ability bias in the return to education has been heightened in recent years by evidence that the return to education has increased in the 1980's. Of course, if individuals’ schooling levels were randomly assigned, the payoff to education could be consistently measured simply by comparing the earnings of more and less educated individuals. In the absence of random assignment, ability bias can be overcome by using instrumental variables that are correlated with education but have no other effect on earnings. This paper reports our analysis of a natural experiment that generates such instruments. The natural experiment stems from the Vietnam-era draft lottery, which was used to determine priority for induction into the U.S. military between 1970 and 1973. As a consequence of the draft lottery, the risk of induction into the armed services was randomly assigned on the basis of individuals' birthdays. 1 See, for example, Blackburn and Neumark (1991). For convenience, we follow the practice of the previous literature and label omitted variables in wage equations that are correlated with education as ability. We note that other omitted factors, such as family wealth, might influence educational achievement and earnings.