Economic Returns to Education: What We Know, What We Don’t Know, and Where We Are Going – Some Brief Pointers

The estimation of the economic return to education has perhaps been one of the predominant areas of analysis in applied economics for over 50 years. In this short note we consider some of the recent directions taken by the literature, and also some of the blockages faced by both science and policymakers in pushing forward some key issues. This serves by way of introduction to a set of papers for a special issue of the Economics of Education Review.Returns to education, education policy

Economic Returns to Education: What We Know, What We Don't Know, and Where We Are Going – Some Brief Pointers

The estimation of the economic return to education has perhaps been one of the predominant areas of analysis in applied economics for over 50 years. In this short note we consider some of the recent directions taken by the literature, and also some of the blockages faced by both science and policymakers in pushing forward some key issues. This serves by way of introduction to a set of papers for a special issue of the Economics of Education Review.education policy, returns to education

Education policy reform and the return to schooling from instrumental variables

This paper analyses levels of low literacy across twelve countries using the International Adult Literacy Survey. We go beyond existing work that only looks at the proportions below certain critical levels of literacy. Using methods developed for the measurement of poverty we calculate measures of literacy that are sensitive to the distribution of literacy within those defined as illiterate. This reveals a different pattern of the extent of literacy problems across countries and within some populations. These measures should be useful to policy makers who need to allocate resources to alleviate low literacy and numeracy.

Decomposing Gender Differences in College Student Earnings Expectations

Despite the increasing coverage and prevalence of equality legislation and the general alignment of key determining characteristics such as educational attainment, gender differentials continue to persist in labour market outcomes, including earnings. Recently, evidence has been found supporting the role of typically unobserved non-cognitive factors in explaining these gender differentials. We contribute to this literature by testing whether gender gaps in the earnings expectations of a representative group of Irish university students are explained by simultaneously controlling for gender heterogeneity across a wide array of cognitive and noncognitive factors. Non-cognitive factors were found to play a significant role in explaining the gender gap, however, gender differentials persist even after controlling for an extensive range of cognitive and non-cognitive factors. Nearly three-quarters of the short run and two-thirds of the long run differential could not be explained.Gender, Education, Inequality, Discrimination, Earnings Expectations.

Parental Education, Grade Attainment & Earnings Expectations among University Students

While there is an extensive literature on intergenerational transmission of economic outcomes (education, health and income for example), many of the pathways through which these outcomes are transmitted are not as well understood. We address this deficit by analysing the relationship between socio-economic status and child outcomes in university, based on a rich and unique dataset of university students. While large socio-economic differences in academic performance exist at the point of entry into university, these differences are substantially narrowed during the period of study. Importantly, the differences across socio-economic backgrounds in university grade attainment for female students is explained by intermediating variables such as personality, risk attitudes and time preferences, and subject/college choices. However, for male students, we explain less than half of the socio-economic gradient through these same pathways. Despite the weakening socio-economic effect in grade attainment, a key finding is that large socio-economic differentials in the earnings expectations of university students persist, even when controlling for grades in addition to our rich set of controls. Our findings pose a sizable challenge for policy in this area as they suggest that equalising educational outcomes may not translate into equal labour market outcomes.Socio-Economic Status, Education, Inequality, Discrimination

The Impact of Parental Income and Education on Child Health : Further Evidence for England

This paper investigates the robustness of recent findings on the effect of parental education and income on child health. We are particularly concerned about spurious correlation arising from the potential endogeneity of parental income and education. We adopt an instrumental variables approach and our results suggest that the parental income and education effects are generally larger than are suggested by the correlations observed in the data. Moreover, we find strong support for the causal effect of income effect being large for the poor but small at the average level of income.Child health ; intergenerational transmission

Education Policy Reform and the Return to Schooling from Instrumental Variabes

We exploit an unusual policy reform which had the effect of reducing the direct cost of schooling in Ireland in the early 1970's. This gave rise to an increased level of schooling but with effects that vary across family background. This interaction generates a set of instrumental variables which we use to estimate the return to schooling allowing for the endogeneity of schooling. We find a large and well determined in the rate of return of the order of 11 or 12% substantially higher than the OLS estimates of around 7%.

The distribution of discrimination in immigrant earnings - evidence from Britain 1974-1993

This paper uses the General Household Survey data for the UK to study earnings discrimination between natives and migrants. The key result is that the main source of discrimination is ethnicity rather than migrant status per se. This paper differs from the conventional focus in studies of earnings discrimination, which focus on mean wage differences. In contrast we study the entire distribution of the wage gap, and incorporate distributionally sensitive measures of the wage gap reflecting different levels of aversion to discrimination. Our results are consistent with previous studies for the UK that find that non-white immigrants are the most widely discriminated in terms of their labour market returns. Moreover this discrimination on the basis of colour is also present in the sub-sample of natives.