What wages do people expect for vocational and academic education backgrounds in Switzerland?

Maria A. Cattaneo

No 197, Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW)

Abstract: Correctly anticipating the earnings for different educational profiles is pivotal in making informed education decisions. In this paper, leveraging unique survey data, we study the wage expectations for academic and vocational education backgrounds in Switzerland. We find significant heterogeneity in the expected wage distributions for given educational profiles and strong differences in wage beliefs by gender, age, socioeconomic status, region of residence, and migration background. Personal reference points seem to matter in forming these wage expectations, and more than half of the respondents overestimate the returns to academic versus vocational education, especially the returns expected at younger ages. The latter is vital for education policy because our analyses show that the expected returns determine preferences for specific educational tracks for the own (hypothetical) child. If education decisions are illinformed, this likely leads to educational mismatches and related adverse effects later in life.

Keywords: wage expectations; educational preferences; biased beliefs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D84 I20 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2022-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-eur and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.business.uzh.ch/RePEc/iso/leadinghouse/0197_lhwpaper.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iso:educat:0197

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sara Brunner ().