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The causal effect of education on earnings
TL;DR: This paper surveys the recent literature on the causal relationship between education and earnings and concludes that the average (or average marginal) return to education is not much below the estimate that emerges from a standard human capital earnings function fit by OLS.
Abstract: This paper surveys the recent literature on the causal relationship between education and earnings. I focus on four areas of work: theoretical and econometric advances in modelling the causal effect of education in the presence of heterogeneous returns to schooling; recent studies that use institutional aspects of the education system to form instrumental variables estimates of the return to schooling; recent studies of the earnings and schooling of twins; and recent attempts to explicitly model sources of heterogeneity in the returns to education. Consistent with earlier surveys of the literature, I conclude that the average (or average marginal) return to education is not much below the estimate that emerges from a standard human capital earnings function fit by OLS. Evidence from the latest studies of identical twins suggests a small upward "ability" bias -- on the order of 10%. A consistent finding among studies using instrumental variables based on institutional changes in the education system is that the estimated returns to schooling are 20-40% above the corresponding OLS estimates. Part of the explanation for this finding may be that marginal returns to schooling for certain subgroups -- particularly relatively disadvantaged groups with low education outcomes -- are higher than the average marginal returns to education in the population as a whole.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors estimate the importance of attained education and occupational categories as mediating channels in the generation of inequality of opportunity in 26 European countries using the Intergenerational Transmission modules from the EU-SILC.
Abstract: Inequality of Opportunity (IO) refers to that inequality stemming from factors, called circumstances, beyond the scope of individual responsibility, such as gender, race, place of birth or socioeconomic background. In general, circumstances do not directly convert into future individual’s income. Indeed, different circumstances in childhood lead to different levels of education and different occupational categories which, in turn, contribute to generate divergent levels of income during adulthood. Using the Intergenerational Transmission modules in 2005 and 2011 from the EU-SILC, we estimate the importance of attained education and occupational category as mediating channels in the generation of IO in 26 European countries. We find that the attained level of education channels up to 30% of total IO, with important differences across Europe. Once attained education is taken into account, occupation explains less than 5% of IO in most countries. Moreover, the importance of education as a channel for IO is negatively correlated both with the share of the population that attains tertiary levels of education and with the importance of government expenditure in education relative to GDP.
36 citations
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TL;DR: This paper proposed a 1-penalized quantile regression estimator for panel data, which explicitly allows for individual heterogeneity associated with covariates and found evidence that positive substitution effects dominate negative wealth effects at the middle of the conditional distribution of hours.
Abstract: This paper proposes new ?1-penalized quantile regression estimators for panel data, which explicitly allows for individual heterogeneity associated with covariates. We conduct Monte Carlo simulations to assess the small sample performance of the new estimators and provide comparisons of new and existing penalized estimators in terms of quadratic loss. We apply the techniques to two empirical studies. First, the new method is applied to the estimation of labor supply elasticities and we find evidence that positive substitution effects dominate negative wealth effects at the middle of the conditional distribution of hours. The overall effect tends to be larger at the lower tail, which suggests that changes in taxes have different effects across the response distribution. Second, we estimate consumer preferences for nutrients from a demand model using a large scanner dataset of household food purchases. We show that preferences for nutrients vary across the conditional distribution of expenditure and across genders, and emphasize the importance of fully capturing consumer heterogeneity in demand modeling. Both applications highlight the importance of estimating individual heterogeneity when designing economic policy.
36 citations
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TL;DR: This article found that the private sector rewards formal education more than the public and, in terms of gender, although in 1986 women had greater returns to schooling than men, by 1998 this difference had been eliminated.
36 citations
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TL;DR: This paper studied the relationship between age and literacy skills in Canada, Norway and the U.S. using data from the 1994 and 2003 International Adult Literacy Surveys and found that the modest negative slope of the literacy-age profile in cross-sectional data arises from offsetting ageing and cohort effects.
36 citations
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TL;DR: In this paper, an intergenerational model is developed, nesting heritable earning abilities and credit constraints limiting human capital investments in children, showing that the parameter of inherited earning ability is tiny.
Abstract: An intergenerational model is developed, nesting heritable earning abilities and credit constraints limiting human capital investments in children. Estimates on a large, Finnish data panel indicate very low transmission from parental earnings, suggesting that the parameter of inherited earning ability is tiny. Family income, particularly during the phase of educating children, is shown to be much more important in shaping children’s lifetime earnings. This influence of parental incomes on children’s earnings rises as the children age because the returns to education rise. Despite Finland’s well-developed welfare state, persistence in economic status across generations is much higher than previously thought.
36 citations