The Distribution of Returns to Education for People with Disabilities

Daniel Henderson (), Andrew Houtenville () and Le Wang ()
Additional contact information
Andrew Houtenville: University of New Hampshire
Le Wang: Virginia Tech

No 10747, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This note takes a first look at the distribution of returns to education for people with disabilities, a particularly disadvantaged group whose labor market performances have not been well studied or documented. Using a nonparametric approach, we uncover significant heterogeneity in the returns to education for these workers, which is drastically masked by the conventional parametric methods. Based on these estimates, we construct the Sharpe ratio of human capital investment (taking into account its substantial risk), and our results corroborate on the claimed importance of human capital in improving these workers' wages. Our stochastic dominance tests, however, show that the returns to education for workers with disabilities, as a group, may have been affected more adversely in the most recent recession, relative to their non-disabled counterparts.

Keywords: education; disability; heterogeneity; risk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 I12 I26 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2017-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-hea
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: Journal of Labor Research, 2017, 38, 261-282

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Journal Article: The Distribution of Returns to Education for People with Disabilities (2017)
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