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We measure the impact of two main signals of tertiary-level human capital accumulation, college quality and certification, on the first stage of the hiring process in India. As part of a correspondence experiment, we send 16,944 resumes to 1412 job postings for recent engineering graduates at small and medium firms in eight major cities. In precisely estimated results, we find that these employers do not respond to signals of tertiary education quality. Specifically, there is no impact on callbacks of having graduated from a mid-tier college ranked in the top 300 relative to one outside of the top 1000. There is also no impact of scoring in the highest as opposed to the lowest quartile of a widely-used post-tertiary certification test. We also examine gender, since employers have often used this as a signal in evaluating workers. There is evidence that women modestly benefit in the first stage of hiring in this market, with this effect concentrated in some regions.

Vietnam's economy and education system have had remarkable success in recent decades, yet there are concerns about the declining returns to higher education since 2008. We document this decline in returns to higher education and propose four hypotheses to explain it. Analysis of the VLSS/VHLSS and LFS data provides little evidence for three of four hypotheses. The fourth hypothesis is that changes in the demand for highly educated labor in Vietnam, perhaps due to recent changes in foreign direct investment inflows, rather than the labor supply, are perhaps the most important determinant of the returns to education across different levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State and federal governments invest millions of dollars in providing accurate and relevant information on expected outcomes to students pursuing higher education, but whether such information targets what students value about college is unclear. We use new survey data to identify the extent to which conventional indicators for college quality and returns correlate with collegegoers' satisfaction with their education. We find that alumni are on average very satisfied with their education, even among those with poor labor market outcomes. Our results suggest the consumptive value of higher education is much higher than economic models of college choices typically assume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates returns to education during a period of sharp wage cuts in Greece, considering both the endogenous nature of education and women's self-selection. Findings suggest that dramatic wage declines were followed by sharp decreases in returns to education, while the documented convergence of returns between genders is an added benefit. Once endogeneity is examined, using parental education and number of siblings in the household as instruments, and self-selection is accounted for, returns to education almost double compared to OLS. These findings are verified using several robustness tests and alternative specifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the impact of educational attainment on employment and earnings in Nepal. Using the Nepal Labour Force Survey 2017–2018 cycle, we employ an extended earnings function derived from the foundational Mincer equation to estimate returns to education. The results underscore the overall positive impact of education (1.76, 3.73, 7.68 and 11.00% increase in earnings by primary, secondary, bachelor's and master's degrees, respectively), which is lower than the average observed in other low– and middle– income countries, except in higher education. The results also indicate persisting disparities for females and disadvantaged groups. The study emphasizes the need for strategic interventions, improved educational infrastructure and inclusive policies to foster equitable opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study updates private returns to education in Uganda using consumption measures as an outcome variable, focusing on obtaining estimates using instrumental variables based on the introduction of the universal primary education policy. Unlike common findings from developed countries, the evidence from this study for a low-income country suggests that returns to education are smaller for liquidity-constrained individuals than for average individuals. The finding also suggests that smaller returns are observed for self-employed farmers than self-employed workers in non-agricultural sectors. The trend, showing smaller returns for liquidity-constrained individuals, is particularly obvious among self-employed farmers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study seeks to identify which factors of an artist’s background and demographic characteristics (age, race, gender, education, location as a child, and family SES) correlate with successful career outcomes (quality of gallery representation, representation in museum exhibitions and collections). Using a sample of 930 artists, created by random sampling from a catalog of represented artists merged with public data on demographic, SES, and educational backgrounds, we conducted a multivariate analysis on differences in artist outcome. Findings suggest a substantial female penalty in gallery representation and museum exhibitions. While an education premium exists, measured by attending top-tier BFA/MFA programs, it does not affect all artists similarly – female artists do not receive gains in the same way that male artists do, while artists from lower SES backgrounds are less likely to attend such programs. We also find that previous cohorts of artists are more established in the modern art world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An extensive sociological literature maintains that cultural capital is pivotal in perpetuating social inequalities. However, empirical tests of cultural capital theory focus on how culture influences educational outcomes, not earnings, and they mainly look for cultural differences across social classes within societies. We propose a direct test of economic returns to cultural capital based instead on differences in national cultures across countries. Using the American Community Survey and the National Survey of College Graduates, we analyze the relationship between immigrants' lack of U.S.-specific cultural capital, proxied by cultural distance between the origin country and the U.S., and their earnings. Findings consistently indicate that origin – U.S. cultural distance is linked to immigrants' lower earnings after controlling for numerous other factors, supporting cultural capital theory. Cultural distance earnings penalties are more pronounced for immigrants with at least a bachelor's degree, those arriving in adulthood, and those with foreign degrees. Moreover, county-level analysis reveals more sizable cultural distance penalties in more competitive and unequal labour markets, highlighting how subnational receiving contexts shape origin-country disparities in immigrants' economic incorporation at their destinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper attempts to investigate the origin of inequality in educational participation across Indian social groups in terms of inequality in the expected monetary educational returns and other demand-side factors responsible behind educational decision. We employ the binary logit model of regression for the accomplishment of the objective of this study. In addition, we decompose the discrepancy in educational participation into 'response effect' and 'attribute effect' to examine whether there is any discrimination in educational participation against the members of the disadvantaged social groups. JEL Classification: I21, I24, I26 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the contribution of the disability education gap to the disability employment gap in the European Union. We find that educational attainment is a major factor determining the probability of employment among persons with disabilities and that the employment effects of tertiary education are much larger among persons with disabilities than among non-disabled people. We also uncover substantial heterogeneity in the role of education across countries. Overall, we estimate that 19% of the disability employment gap in the 25–34 age group can be attributed to the gap in education between individuals with and without disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graduate education is among the fastest growing segments of the U.S. higher educational system. This paper estimates the returns to Master's degrees and examines heterogeneity in the returns by field area, student demographics and initial labor market conditions. We use rich administrative data from Ohio and an individual fixed effects model that compares students' earnings trajectories before and after earning a Master's degree. Findings show that obtaining a Master's degree increased quarterly earnings by about 14% on average, but the returns vary largely across graduate fields. We also find gender and racial disparities in the returns, with higher average returns for women than for men, and for White than for Black graduates. In addition, by comparing returns among students who graduated before and under the Great Recession, we show that economic downturns appear to reduce but not eliminate the positive returns to Master's degrees. There are important variations in the returns to Master's degrees during the recession across field area and race/ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many countries, school attendance starts on a fixed date. In contrast, New Zealand uses rolling admissions and children can start school throughout the year, right after their fifth birthday. However, children turning five during a school holiday need to wait until the start of the following teaching term. This system generates an exogenous variation in the amount of time spent in primary school and enables us to estimate the causal effects of early schooling, independent from the effects of age. Using rich microdata on all high school leavers in New Zealand from 2009 to 2016, we find that an additional month of early schooling increases the probability of achieving a top high school certificate by 6% and qualifying for university entrance by 5%. These are large long-term effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an equilibrium model with inter-linked frictional labour and marriage markets. Women's flow value of being single is treated as given, and it captures returns from employment. Men can undertake a costly ex-ante investment in schooling. In the marriage market, women search sequentially for men characterised by wages, so they use a reservation value strategy. Single unemployed men conduct marital sequential search and, with an eye on the marriage market, also conduct a so-called constrained sequential job search. Given this setup, schooling enhances men's marriage prospects as well as their labour market returns. In turn, women's behaviour affects men's schooling investment decision and their optimal job search strategy. We establish that for any given set of parameters, there exists a unique market equilibrium where a fraction of men get educated, and show that this fraction decreases if women's labour market returns increase. We also examine the robustness of such an equilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'paradox of progress' is an empirical regularity that associates more education with larger income inequality. Two driving and competing factors behind this phenomenon are the convexity of the 'Mincer equation' (that links wages and education) and the heterogeneity in the returns to education, as captured by quantile regressions. We propose a joint least-squares and quantile regression statistical framework to derive a decomposition to evaluate the relative contribution of each explanation. We apply the proposed decomposition strategy to the case of Argentina 1992 to 2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expectations about future labour market opportunities are essential for education and labour market decisions. This paper uses data from a survey of youths in seven Latin American and Caribbean countries to explore the role of expected returns to education on schooling decisions. We find substantial variation in subjective expectations partly explained by youths' socioeconomic characteristics. Also, we find that enrolment in tertiary education is positively related to perceived education returns. Furthermore, the association of expectations with schooling choices differs across individuals in relevant domains, including gender, skills, and socioeconomic background. Our results suggest that public policies might impact choices and reduce socioeconomic gaps in schooling by providing information on education returns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some college players face the tradeoff between continuing their education and entering the draft and forfeiting college eligibility. Little empirical research focuses on this "stay or go pro" decision. We analyze early draft entry decisions made by college football underclassmen with remaining eligibility over the 2007/08-2018/19 seasons. Regression results support both the human capital explanation for early draft entry in that players acquiring more human capital in the previous season by playing in more games increases the likelihood of early entry and the option value perspective in that playing on a more successful team increases the likelihood of early entry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to analyze the education-job mismatch effect on the return to education in Cameroon, by using data on employment provided by the National Institute of Statistics. Based on Verdugo and Verdugo's model estimate, we use several types of regression models to examine both the heterogeneity in returns to education derived from education-job mismatch and the choice of different types of selection model. Results show that overeducation is associated with a wage penalty while undereducation leads to a wage premium. With each year of schooling, differences in earning are significant between overeducated, undereducated, and well-matched people. They also show a substantial difference in the magnitude of coefficients with respect to the control variables for different types of selection model. This difference observed across different models implies that the estimation of returns to schooling is highly sensitive to the model's specification. Beyond other contributions, this study highlights the need to exercise a fair degree of care in the choice of an appropriate model for analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collapse of the USSR in late 1991 inspired social science research on levels, patterns, and trends in inequality within Russia, due to theoretical interest in how market transition affects social stratification. The start of the Putin regime in 2000 marked a new era in Russia's post‐Soviet political economic trajectory: in contrast to the 1990s, the economy first took off, then stagnated, while the state rolled back institutions of democracy and civic freedoms. In short, Russia became a consolidated market economy under authoritarian rule. In this context research has continued to produce insights into social stratification. The labor market featured high levels of employment but with downward wage flexibility, modest decreases in earnings inequality, and persistent returns to education, gender wage gaps, and locality‐based differences. Waves of labor migration to Russia, resurgent traditional gender norms, shrinking population, housing inequality, health disparities, and a small contingent of ultra‐rich represent additional noteworthy developments. Although market transition is no longer an intriguing theoretical lens through which to view social stratification in Russia, the topic nonetheless holds broader theoretical interest because inequality became closely intertwined with Russia's political economy, social policies, and geopolitical actions, including those that culminated in Putin's decision to invade Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combining study and work has become a widespread phenomenon in Russia. According to the national monitoring of graduate employment, about 53% of full-time bachelor and specialist degree holders worked for at least one month during their studies. The article presents a comprehensive analysis of the characteristics of combining study and work and an assessment of their contribution to individual wages and the probability of employment one year after graduation. The results suggest that regular employment during the academic year is more common than temporary employment during the summer break. On average, combining study and work increases the probability of employment one year after graduation by 16-19% and brings a wage premium of 14%. However, there are significant differences in the size of the effect depending on the characteristics of student employment and educational factors. The combination of studying and working in the final years of university has a larger effect on wages and the probability of employment. There are significant cross effects between the fact of combining study and work with fields of study and the degree of university selectivity. The observed effects suggest that a special model of transition from study to work has emerged in Russia, in which professional career entry precedes graduation. Moreover, the results of the study show that there is a strong complementarity between education and combining study with work. Combining study and work does not yield significant returns when the quality of education is low, while success in the labour market is achieved through a combination of different educational factors and not solely work experience.

Studying abroad acts as investment in human capital and ideally outweighs associated investment costs due to higher earnings or related non-monetary benefits. We estimate monetary returns to studying abroad for female graduates 1 and 5 years after graduation. The empirical estimates—based on panel data from four graduate cohorts in 1997, 2001, 2005, and 2009—confirm positive returns to studying abroad. Mobile females earn 3.2% higher wages compared to non-mobiles at labor market entry. These initial wage gains tend to improve further over time, resulting in about 4.0% higher earnings for mobile females 5 years after graduation. Detailed consideration of different socio-economic groups reveals that female graduates from non-academic backgrounds and females majoring in social sciences benefit most. Studying abroad, therefore, has positive effects on later income of female graduates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One million international students study in the United States each year, and the majority of them compete in global labor markets after graduation. I conducted a large-scale field experiment and a companion employer survey to study how employers in China value U.S. college education. I sent more than 27,000 fictitious online applications to business and computer science jobs in China, randomizing the country of college education. I find that U.S.-educated applicants are on average 18% less likely to receive a callback than applicants educated in China, with applicants from very selective U.S. institutions underperforming those from the least selective Chinese institutions. The United States-China callback gap is smaller at high-wage jobs, consistent with employers fearing U.S.-educated applicants have better outside options and would be harder to hire and retain. The gap is also smaller at foreign-owned firms, consistent with Chinese-owned firms knowing less about American education. Controlling for high school quality, test scores, or U.S. work experiences does not attenuate the gap, suggesting that the gap is not driven by employer perceptions of negative selection. A survey of 507 hiring managers at college career fairs finds consistent and additional supporting evidence for the experimental findings. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: This work was supported by the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University and the Prize Fellowship in Social Sciences awarded by Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4745. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the causal relationship between education and earnings, or the returns to education, using Thailand's socio-economic household survey data. We show that, with the minimum modeling assumption, the causal effect of education on earnings can be nonparametrically identified only when there is no unobserved ability affecting both education and earning, and when the selection mechanisms are conditionally independent to earnings conditioning on potential experience and education. The causal effects of education on earnings are estimated using a nonparametric approach with selection bias adjustment and parametric approaches with selection bias and ability bias adjustments. The results show different estimates for returns to education across model specifications, indicating the importance of the bias adjustments and parametric assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies suggest a relationship between education and political participation, but only some address causality. We add to this by re-examining the German case. For identification, we exploit an exogenous increase in compulsory schooling, and use data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). The data enable analyses that do not rely solely on the conversion of school-leaving qualifications into schooling duration but use the individuals' actual length of schooling as part of their educational biographies. Our results indicate that the well-known association between education and political participation partially reflects causal effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression remains dominant in instrumental variables estimation of causal effects even though the literature has shown that 2SLS may be inconsistent when effects are heterogenous and the instrument is only valid when conditioning on covariates. To show that this is not merely a hypothetical threat, this paper re-estimates the returns to college using college proximity as an instrument based on the data from Card (Aspects of labour market behavior: essays in honour of John Vanderkamp, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1995). The results show that 2SLS yields systematically larger estimates of the returns to college than more flexible estimators based on the instrument propensity score. In the full sample, differences amount to about 50 to 100%. This is due to the implicit conditional-variance weighting performed by 2SLS. Moreover, in line with the theoretical prediction by Sloczynski (When should we (not) interpret linear IV estimands as LATE? IZA discussion papers 14349, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), 2021), findings suggest that the impact of the conditional-variance weighting is larger when instrument groups are not roughly the same size. Thus, it is advised to use 2SLS with caution and use estimators based on the instrument propensity score instead when groups are of different size and covariates are predictive of the instrument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilizing a dataset from Metro Manila in the Philippines, we estimate the impact of gender on the return of education for individuals with disabilities, specifically focusing on visual, hearing, and walking difficulties. Controlling sample selection to address endogenous labor participation and accounting for the endogeneity of schooling decisions, our estimations reveal a significant rate of return to education, ranging from 25.7% to 38.1%. Importantly, examining the potential for nonlinear-schooling return, we observe a more pronounced effect of disability for females compared to their male counterparts, suggesting the presence of dual discrimination and signaling effects for females. Our research emphasizes the urgency for the Philippine government to not only improve educational opportunities but also to enhance employment prospects, particularly for females with disabilities. Some of the policy recommendations would include the implementation of equal-opportunity measures, including antidiscrimination policies; an expanded quota system to boost employment opportunities; efforts to address accessibility issues; and subsidies for private-sector employment are also necessary for the economic empowerment of females with disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilizing a dataset from Metro Manila in the Philippines, we estimate the impact of gender on the return of education for individuals with disabilities, specifically focusing on visual, hearing, and walking difficulties. Controlling sample selection to address endogenous labor participation and accounting for the endogeneity of schooling decisions, our estimations reveal a significant rate of return to education, ranging from 25.7% to 38.1%. Importantly, examining the potential for nonlinear-schooling return, we observe a more pronounced effect of disability for females compared to their male counterparts, suggesting the presence of dual discrimination and signaling effects for females. Our research emphasizes the urgency for the Philippine government to not only improve educational opportunities but also to enhance employment prospects, particularly for females with disabilities. Some of the policy recommendations would include the implementation of equal-opportunity measures, including antidiscrimination policies; an expanded quota system to boost employment opportunities; efforts to address accessibility issues; and subsidies for private-sector employment are also necessary for the economic empowerment of females with disabilities.

Education is the one of the corner-stones of a society and as long as this is not consolidated in the rural environment, nothing endures. Our research aims to explore the difference between the average score from national assessment examination and the average score in lower secondary school cycle. As such, a research variable, the “score discrepancy” is employed. The findings show that that the average score at the National Evaluation exam is lower than the average score after completing the lower-secondary educational cycle. Furthermore, the ANOVA test results for the score discrepancy in 2022 and three years before, and by year and area of residency followed by year and sex reveal that there is a statistically significant difference between the series. The results for Romania depict that more effort has to be done in the education for the rural pupils to catch up the results of their counterparts.

This paper assesses the relevance of the Mincerian Equation in Mauritius. Using CMPHS data, the basic equation is augmented to cater for wage responsiveness to changes across different schooling levels. However, the use of the standard linear regression method does not take into consideration the endogeneity of the variable years of schooling and sample selection bias. The IV2SLS Method is adopted, using region as an instrument. The Heckit model is further adopted to address the problem of sample selection bias. This study also employs pseudo panel models as an alternative to IV2SLS as a weak instrument may significantly impact results.

AbstractThis study revisits returns to education in three Vietnamese rural provinces, using data on seven waves between 2007 and 2017, taken from the Thailand Vietnam SocioEconomic Panel (TVSEP). We deploy various approaches to address the endogeneity problem, and the findings show that individuals with a lower secondary school diploma are likely to earn a higher wage income. The present research also provides evidence of heterogeneity in the rate of return in terms of sex and ethnicity. In particular, men need a lower secondary school diploma, while women require an upper secondary school diploma to improve their wage income. Similarly, the relationship between a lower secondary school diploma and wage income is found among the majority of the Kinh people, but ethnic minorities do not enjoy this benefit. Overall, the benefits of education are crucial among the labor force, especially for vulnerable groups, such as women and ethnic minorities, who would benefit from the support of policymakers.

Since 1980, 25% of US students repeated a grade during their academic career. Despite this, few economists account for retention when measuring education and experience, causing bias when retention is correlated with other regressors of interest. Rising minimum dropout ages since 1960 have increased retention, causing positive bias in 2SLS estimates of the returns to education. Retention also causes endogenous measurement error in potential experience. In addition to distorting experience-wage profiles across countries, this endogenous measurement error causes the residual Black-White wage gap and the returns to a high school diploma to be overstated. Proxying for age instead of potential experience reduces this bias, suggesting age, not potential experience, should be a standard control variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study intends to estimate the rate of returns to education in Vietnam, the distributive effects of education on wages, and the wage penalty from the incidence of overeducation in the Vietnamese labor market during 2004–2016. This study employs a pseudo‐panel approach to address omitted variables bias and the unconditional quantile regression to identify the heterogeneity of returns to education across the income distribution. Our main finding indicates that the estimated rate of returns to education in Vietnam is approximately 6.5%, showing a downward bias from previous estimates. The returns vary across wage distributions, where a lower rate of return is observed in lower quantiles and a higher rate among those individuals at the higher quantiles. The returns to education have declined since 2008, confirming the oversupply of highly educated workers in the Vietnamese labor market with an estimated wage penalty of 17%. Government assistance measures are needed to reduce the overeducation and the wage penalty issues in the Vietnamese labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion of higher education resulted in a growing interest in post‐graduation labour market outcomes. Two conflicting narratives are present in the debate. The first focuses on the shortage of skills and the need for further expansion of the sector and seems to pertain mostly to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The second revolves around over‐education and mismatch leading to graduate unemployment or underemployment. Such concerns pertain especially to humanities and social sciences. However, in this article, we argue that the STEM versus non‐STEM opposition on which this debate is premised is not adequate for analysing post‐graduation labour market outcomes. We leverage a unique administrative dataset comprising monthly records on the labour market status of the entire population of recent Polish university graduates (N = 161,323) to demonstrate the heterogeneity of the STEM category in terms of labour market outcomes and the limited predictive value of the field of study for those outcomes. We argue that the category is too broad and internally diverse to be used as an overarching category, especially in research meant to inform policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the Mincer earnings function and presents comparable estimates of the average monetary returns associated with an additional year of education across different regions worldwide. In contrast to the traditional Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) method commonly employed in the literature, this study applied a cutting-edge approach known as Support Vector Regression (SVR), which belongs to the family of machine learning (ML) algorithms. SVR is specifically chosen to address the bias arising from underfitting inherent in OLS. The analysis focuses on recent data spanning from 2010 to 2018, ensuring temporal homogeneity across the examined regions. The findings reveal that each additional year of education, on average, yields a private rate of returns of 10.4%. Notably, Sub-Saharan Africa exhibits the highest returns to education at 17.8%, while Europe demonstrates the lowest returns at 7.2%. Moreover, higher education is associated with the highest returns across the regions, with a rate of 12%, whereas primary education yields returns of 10%. Interestingly, women generally experience higher returns than men, with rates of 10.6 and 10.1%, respectively. Over time, the returns to education exhibit a modest decline, decreasing at a rate of approximately 0.1% per year, while the average duration of education demonstrates an increase of 0.16 years per year (1% per year). The application of the state-of-the-art ML technique, SVR, not only improves the accuracy of estimates but also enhances predictive performance measures such as the coefficient of determination (R 2) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) when compared to the OLS method. The implications drawn from these findings emphasize the need for expanding university education, as well as investments in primary education, along with significant attention toward promoting girls’ education. These findings hold considerable importance for policymakers who are tasked with making informed decisions regarding education expenditure and the implementation of education financing programs.

We estimate the effect of an increased autonomy policy for higher-performing students on short- and longer-term school outcomes. We exploit an institutional setting with high demand for autonomy. Identification comes from a nationwide natural experiment that allowed higher-achieving students to miss 44 percent more classes with parental approval. Using a difference-in-difference-in-differences approach, we find that allowing higher-achieving students to skip more classes increases their performance in subjects that matter for university admission and improves the quality of their enrolled college degree. Top-performing students and students in more academically diverse classrooms demand more autonomy when it is offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the effects of an oversubscribed job-training program on skills and labor-market outcomes using both survey and administrative data. Overall, vocational training improves labor-market outcomes, particularly by increasing formal employment. A second round of randomization evaluates how applicants to otherwise similar job-training programs are affected by the extent that hard versus soft skills are emphasized in the curriculum. Admission to a vocational program that emphasizes technical relative to social skills generates greater short-term benefits, but these relative benefits quickly disappear, putting participants in the technical training on equal footing with their peers from the soft-skill training in under a year. Results from an additional randomization suggest that offering financial support for transportation and food increases the effectiveness of the program. The program fails to improve the soft skills or broader labor-market outcomes of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how returns to education have evolved in the context of post‐conflict reconstruction and economic growth in Mozambique over the period 1996–2015. We show that private rates of return to education have declined at lower levels of schooling, but remained stable and possibly even increased at the highest levels. Returns are increasingly convex in non‐agricultural jobs but almost flat in agriculture. Using consumption expenditure data, as opposed to income data, allows estimation of returns for the entire labour market, not just the minority in formal sector jobs. Results are robust to a wide range of specifications, including use of a pseudo‐panel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the returns to test scores from the 2009 Vietnamese National Entrance Examination to University (NEEU) of individuals born in 1991. We investigate their labour outcomes in terms of hourly wage and employment measured in 2018 or 2020. We find that a one standard deviation increase in the standardized test score on the NEEU is associated with a 9% increase in wage rate 9–11 years later. The results also suggest that mathematics test scores have a significant correlation with labour outcomes in the long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The returns to schooling are estimated for 28 European and Central Asian countries using the Mincerian function. Our results show that while the public sector pays on average more than the private sector, the effect of education on earnings is stronger in the private sector. However, the returns to tertiary education are higher in the private sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents new benefit–cost estimates for the Tulsa universal pre-K program. These calculations are based on estimated effects, from two recent papers, of Tulsa pre-K on high-school graduation rates and college attendance rates of students who were in kindergarten in the fall of 2006. In the current paper, educational effects from these prior papers are used to infer lifetime earnings effects. Our conservative estimates suggest that per pre-K participant, the present value of earnings effects in 2021 dollars is $25,533, compared with program costs of $9,628, for a benefit–cost ratio of 2.65. Compared to prior benefit–cost studies of Tulsa pre-K, this benefit–cost ratio is below what was predicted from Tulsa pre-K's effects on kindergarten test scores, but above what was predicted from Tulsa pre-K's effects on grade retention by ninth grade. This fading and recovery of predicted pre-K effects as children go through K-12 and then enter adulthood is consistent with prior research. It suggests that pre-K may have important effects on "soft skills," such as persisting in school, and reminds us that short-term studies of pre-K provide useful information for public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inequality of opportunity (IOp) in the four largest economies in Europe – France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom – around 2015 accounts for a significant share of inequality of incomes, between 30 and 50 percent, depending on the inequality index and using a parametric approach. Mirroring the reduction of inequality of incomes over the last three decades, the long-term trend of IOp, the focus of this paper, has been declining for all countries but Italy. Declining trends are also observed for IOp estimated for age, gender, and birth cohorts sub-groups of the national populations. The closing of the gender gap accounts for a large share of the reduction of the IOp of the overall population. When decomposing age and birth cohort effects, the age effect of IOp exhibits an inverted U shape and, at the same age, IOp experienced by most recent cohorts is lower than preceding ones. To guide the interpretation of the observed declining trends, we use a theoretical framework describing the mechanisms through which changes in circumstances may be correlated to changes of inequality of opportunity. Three variables are considered by this framework: a) intergenerational persistence in educational attainment, b) return of education, and c) social origins. The first two variables are declining in all countries and are consistent with the reduction of IOp. However, 'higher' social origins seem to become increasingly more correlated with higher (labor) incomes and, in some countries (notably Italy), increasing relevance of this third variable slows down the overall reduction of IOp. Social origins, proxied by educated parents, remain significant even after controlling for parental resources (books at home when aged 14) or children' skills (numeracy and literacy). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This is a study determining which factor is a stronger return to education in a post-undergraduate setting: Grade Point Average (GPA) or the perceived “prestige” of the University attended. To classify what is considered “prestigious” and non- “prestigious”, I used rankings from the U.S News Best Colleges Rankings to classify the University of California campuses onto two separate tiers based on these rankings. I implement a survey on Amazon Mechanical Turk, in which subjects are asked whether they would prefer to hire a job candidate with a higher GPA from a lower tier university versus a job candidate with a lower GPA from a higher tier university. Using this survey data, I find that subjects have a strong preference for candidates with higher GPA. This preference still holds when including respondents that have hiring experience. The implications are that individuals will re-evaluate their preferences when applying to a university.