Returns to education and to experience within the EU: are there differences between wage earners and the self-employed?

This paper investigates the returns to education and to experience within the 15 pre-enlargement EU countries, distinguishing between wage earners and the self-employed. These returns are estimated by using a comparable data set coming from the European Community Household Panel during the period 1994-2000. To correct for the ability bias and recover the education coefficients, an Efficient Generalized Instrumental Variable technique is applied. Although the results differ across countries, two common features can be observed. First, the earnings-experience profiles indicate certain traits of competitiveness in the labor markets and, secondly, the returns to education show that signaling plays a relevant role in the earnings of workers.Returns to education, wage earners, self-employed, panel data, European Union

The Effects of Public Capital on the Growth in Spanish Productivity

The aim of the article is to provide new evidence concerning the effect of public capital on productivity growth in Spain. To this end, the article follows the growth accounting approach, which, in addition to measuring both the direct and indirect effects of public capital on the total factor productivity, allows for assessing whether there is a distinctive impact of public capital across economic sectors. The results lead to three main conclusions: (1) Public capital has a strong influence on growth when we use data from the whole economy; (2) this influence varies across sectors, being more relevant in the exposed sectors (industry) than in sheltered sectors (agriculture, construction, and services); and (3) irrespective of the definition used for public capital, these basic results remain unchanged. (JEL "C30", "E62", "H54", "O47", "O52") Copyright 2003 Western Economic Association International.

Education returns of wage earners and self-employed workers: Response

This is a response to [Jordahl, H., Poutvaara, P., & Tuomala, J. (2009). Comment on education returns of wage earners and self-employed workers. Economics of Education Review 28]. We acknowledge that econometrics have improved since the time our original paper was written, so that the choice of accurate instruments is now more deeply founded. However, in this note, we argue that the differences in the estimates obtained by Jordahl et al. (2009) has been generated not only because the "sensibility of HT estimators to the choice of instrumental variables", but also to the estimation metholology followed by them, in which rarely changing variables are considered to be time-varying.Education Entrepreneurship Human capital EGIV estimator