Essays on the Economics of Education

Post-secondary education is becoming increasingly more common for students around the world. As quantity of education increases, it becomes less of a distinguishing factor to be simply a college graduate. For those who want to stand out, the quality aspects of education become more salient. Moreover, as this expansion happens in the number of colleges and college students, it becomes less common for governments to generously fund the college education of a lucky few. In addition, the cost to colleges to provide an education is also increasing. Taken together, simply as a measure of cost-comparison, choosing between colleges based on the potential quality-for-money is also an important reason for college quality's increasing salience. College quality matters, and this dissertation endeavors to show how and to what extent. The following three separate chapters estimate the returns to different forms of college quality. There has been an extensive literature that shows, in general, that more schooling is better. These chapters seek to shift the margin of analysis from the extensive margin of quantity to the intensive margin of quality. Thus, I ask the question: is better schooling better or, to put it another way, how much better is better schooling? In the first chapter, I estimate the returns to college quality, operationalized mainly through peer quality, using a regression discontinuity design and exploiting the two separate rounds (early and regular) of college admissions in Taiwan. In the second chapter, focusing on college prestige, I again use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the returns to scoring just above (vs. just below) the admissions cutoff for the lowest-ranked national college. The theory of action is that national colleges are uniformly more desirable than private colleges (excluding a few elite private colleges), if for no other reason than that their tuitions are subsidized by the government and thus much lower for the individual. The final chapter looks at a set of 11 colleges that ...