JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Wisconsin Press andThe Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Human Resources.Although economists have found a positive association between undergraduate grade-point-average (GPA) and post-baccalaureate earnings (Wise 1975;Filer 1981Filer , 1983 with some evidence of a difference by gender (Filer 1981(Filer , 1983, the relationship has not been extensively studied.l Furthermore, economists debate whether the human capital (Wise 1975) or the screening hypothesis (Lazear 1977) explains the relationship.Using more recent information and a data set improved because grades have the common reference of only one university's evaluation of students, this study estimates the GPA-earnings relationship on the first job and five years after graduation. The estimated positive relationship is larger than in previous studies and is significant for both men and women. Three tests are conducted to determine support for the human capital or the screening hypothesis as the connecting link between GPA and earn- ings. These tests examine the relationship between (a) grades and on-thejob investment, (b) grades and earnings on the first job after graduation, and (c) grades and earnings by establishment size. The tests provide littleThe authors wish to thank Randall K. Filer for supplying unpublished regression findings of his work and several anonymous referees for helpful comments upon an earlier version of this paper. 1. In earlier work, Weisbrod and Karpoff (1968) used rank in graduating class instead of GPA. They found from their study of male employees of one company that rank in class was associated with a higher rate of increase in earnings while employed by the company. THE JOURNAL OF HUMAN RESOURCES * XXV * 2This content downloaded from 195.78.108.168 on Fri, 9 May 2014 14:18:58 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 254 The Journal of Human Resources support for screening and no strong evidence for rejecting a human capital interpretation.Information about the GPA-earnings relationship is useful in formulating education policy and understanding the gender-earnings gap. For the past two decades federal support of higher education has stressed access to college as a means of extending employment opportunity to a broader spectrum of the population. This policy has ignored improved academic achievement as a means of also enhancing earnings for persons assisted by student aid programs. Such an oversight may stem from the education community's continuing doubt that GPA and later earnings are related except through GPA requirements for admission to graduate and professional ...
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Wisconsin Press andThe Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Human Resources. ABSTRACTThis paper uses National Longitudinal Surveys data to examine the relationship between part-week work and the wages and postschool human capital investment of married women. The empirical evidence presented is consistent with the hypothesis that part-week workers and their employers will have relatively lower incentive to invest in on-the-job training since partweek work means fewer hours in the labor market than full-week employment. The effect of part-week work by women on the male-female wage differential is ambiguous because the labor force participation of married women is discontinuous over the life cycle. Differences between men and women in their employment experience over the life cycle have frequently been suggested as contributing to differences in earnings by sex. Recently, Jacob Mincer and Solomon Polachek [7]attributed a significant portion of the male-female wage differential to sex differences in human capital investment and labor force participation. Their work strongly emphasized the greater intermittency and shorter duration of the work experience of women relative to men. Another difference between male and female work patterns, perhaps just as striking, is the greater extent of part-week work among women. Today about one-1 The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines part-week work as work of less than 35 hours per week. Part-week work may be of two types: (a) the job is regularly scheduled for work hours of less than 35 hours per week, and (b) because of transitory events, the workweek is
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