WORKING P A P E R
The Signaling Value of a High School Diploma
FRANCISCO MARTORELL, DAMON CLARK
WR-780-UFLA
August 2010
This product is part of the RAND Education working paper series. RAND working papers are intended to share researchers’ latest findings and to solicit informal peer review. They have been approved for circulation by RAND Education but have not been formally edited or peer reviewed. Unless otherwise indicated, working papers can be quoted and cited without permission of the author, provided the source is clearly referred to as a working paper. RAND’s publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors. is a registered trademark. The Signaling Value of a High School Diploma
Paco Martorell RAND
Damon Clark University of Florida, NBER, IZA
12 August 2010
Abstract Although economists acknowledge that various indicators of educational attainment (e.g., highest grade completed, credentials earned) might serve as signals of a worker’s productivity, the practical importance of education-based signaling is not clear. In this paper we estimate the signaling value of a high school diploma, the most commonly held credential in the U.S. To do so, we compare the earnings of workers that barely passed and barely failed high school exit exams, standardized tests that, in some states, students must pass to earn a high school diploma. Since these groups should, on average, look the same to rms (the only di erence being that "barely passers" have a diploma while "barely failers" do not), this earnings comparison should identify the signaling value of the diploma. Using linked administrative data on earnings and education from two states that use high school exit exams (Florida and Texas), we estimate that a diploma has little e ect on earnings. For both states, we can reject that individuals with a diploma earn eight percent more than otherwise-identical individuals without one; combining the state-speci c estimates, we can reject signaling values larger than ve or six percent. While these con dence intervals include economically important signaling values, they exclude both the raw earnings di erence between workers with and without a diploma and the regression-adjusted estimates reported in the previous literature.