Immigrant Returns to Education and Experience: Analysis of Skill Discounting in Canada.

Rapport de recherche

The economic returns to education in Mexico: a comparison between urban and rural areas

Includes bibliography

Comment: Earnings Returns to Education in Urban China: A Note on Testing Differences among Groups

Comment on Wu and Xie, ASR, June 2003

Human Capital Externalities and Private Returns to Education in Kenya

We use micro data to analyse the effect of human capital externality on earnings and private returns to education. The earnings equations are estimated using the OLS method for a sample of full-time workers. The results show that human capital has a positive effect on earnings, indicating that an increase in education benefits all workers. However, men benefit more from women's education than the women do from men's. The effects of human capital externality on private returns to schooling are shown to vary substantially between rural and urban areas and across levels of the education system.

Individual returns to education in the Spanish tourism sector during the economic crisis

This paper analyses individual returns to education in the Spanish tourism sector. The results, which are robust to different specifications of Mincer earnings regressions, show that the earnings returns to schooling for tourism workers are only half those for all other sectors, and that the difference in returns between these two groups has increased significantly during the economic crisis. This has happened at a time when the earnings range between those with lower and higher qualifications has narrowed in tourism while it has remained stable in other sectors, and when tourism has been capable of retaining most of its workforce while the rest of the economy has experienced a sharp decrease in employment.

Measuring Returns to Education and Human Capital in the Southern Mediterranean. MEDPRO Technical Report No. 17/September 2012

Measuring human capital has been a significant challenge for economists because the main variable of interest is intangible and not directly observable. In the Middle Eastern and Northern African region the task is further complicated by the general scarcity of comparable and reliable data. This study overcomes these challenges by relying on a unique international survey that covers most of the region and by deriving a market-based measure that uses returns to education and various labour market factors as guidance. The results show that private returns to schooling are relatively low in most southern Mediterranean countries (SMC). Israel and Turkey are clear outliers, surpassing even the EU-MED averages. In Algeria and Jordan, the returns are almost flat, implying that earnings do not respond significantly to education levels. Despite high attainment levels, Greece, Spain and Portugal also perform badly; only marginally surpassing some of the bottom-ranked SMC, providing evidence of problems in absorption capacity. The baseline scenarios for 2030 show substantial sensitivity to current estimates on returns to education. In particular, improving attainment levels can produce measurable gains in the future only when the returns to education are already high. Such is the case for Egypt, Morocco and Turkey, which substantially improve their human capital stocks under the baseline scenarios, surpassing several EU-MED countries with little or no room for improvement.

Unemployment and private returns to higher education in Argentina (1974-2002)

Resumen: El trabajo analiza la evolución de los retornos privados a la educación superior en Argentina durante el período 1974–2002 y cómo éstos se vieron afectados por el desempleo. La conclusión es que los retornos a la educación son mayores si se los corrige teniendo en cuenta el desempleo para cada nivel educativo, ya que a mayor nivel, menor tasa de desempleo. Al evaluar invertir en educación no se debería considerar simplemente el diferencial de ingresos sino también la mayor probabilidad de tener un trabajo. Esto es relevante en un país como Argentina que pasó de tener tasas de desempleo cercanas a 5% en la década del ochenta a tener tasas de dos dígitos a fines del siglo XX y comienzos del XXI.

The Returns to Migration: The Influence of Education and Migration Type

We show the impact of migration type on real wages over time. We create a migration and earnings history from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth over the period 1979-2002. We estimate the effects of primary, onward, and two types of return migration on real wages using a panel data model with individual, location, and time fixed effects. Panel data are well suited for the study of the returns to U.S. internal migration because the influence of migration on wages has been found to occur years after the event. We differentiate return migration into two types: return to a location with ties that form a geographical anchor (home) and return to a prior place of work. We find that real wage growth varies by migration type. Education attainment is a significant factor in real wage growth. Our results show that onward migration is an important channel by which the monetary rewards to a college education are manifested.

Do Colombian students underestimate higher education returns?

We analyze the determinants of subjective returns of higher education in Colombia. The information on expectations has been collected in categories, motivating the use of interval regression and an ordered probit approaches for modeling the relationship between beliefs and measures of ability, conditioning on individual, school and regional covariates. The results suggest that there are considerable differences in the size of the expected returns according to some population groups and a strong dominance of college against technical education. Gender gaps disappear in college education but it is found that girls tend to believe that professional wages are more concentrated into higher income categories than boys. Finally, it seems that Colombian students overestimate the pecuniary returns to education.

Online Format vs. Live Mode of Instruction: Do Human Capital Differences or Differences in Returns to Human Capital Explain the Differences in Outcomes?

Our paper asks the question: Does mode of instruction format (live or online format) effect test scores in the principles of macroeconomics classes? Our data are from several sections of principles of macroeconomics, some in live format, some in online format, and all taught by the same instructor. We find that test scores for the online format, when corrected for sample selection bias, are four points higher than for the live format, and the difference is statistically significant. One possible explanation for this is that there was slightly higher human capital in the classes that had the online format. A Oaxaca decomposition of this difference in grades was conducted to see how much was due to human capital and how much was due to the differences in the rates of return to human capital. This analysis reveals that 25% of the difference was due to the higher human capital with the remaining 75% due to differences in the returns to human capital. It is possible that for the relatively older student with the appropriate online learning skill set, and with schedule constrains created by family and job, the online format provides them with a more productive learning environment than does the alternative traditional live class format. Also, because our data are limited to the student s academic transcript, we recommend future research include data on learning style characteristics, and the constraints formed by family and job choices.

Returns to migration : the role of educational attainment in rural Tanzania

Given the migration premium previously identified in an impact evaluation approach, this paper asks the question of why migration is not more prominent, given such high premium associated with it. Using long-term household panel data drawn from rural Tanzania, Kagera for the period 1991-2004, this study aims to answer this question by exploring the contribution of education in the migration premium. By separating migrants into those that moved out of original villages but remained within Kagera and those who left the region, this study finds that, in consumption, the return on investment in education is higher at both destinations. However, whilst the higher return on education fully explains the gains associated with migration within Kagera, it only partly explains those of external migration. These findings suggest that welfare opportunities are higher at the destination and that an individual's limited investment in education plays a major role in preventing short-distance migration from becoming a significant source of raising welfare, which is not the case for long-distance migration. While education plays a role, it appears that other mechanisms may prohibit rural agents from exploiting the arbitrage opportunity when they migrate to the destination at a great distance from the source.