Returns to Education and Macroeconomic Shocks: Evidence from Argentina

Florencia Lopez Boo

No 4753, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Returns to schooling in urban Argentina increased from 1992 to 2003, a period of economic reforms and macroeconomic volatility. In this paper I provide the most consistent estimates of returns to education so far, while I also investigate earnings profiles over time. This paper contributes to the existing literature by employing a variety of methodologies in order to estimate these returns and by using macroeconomic time series to explore shifts in earnings. The pattern of the increasing returns to education changes after the 2001 crisis. Until then, increasing convexity in the earnings-education profile reflects increasing or stable earnings for college graduates combined with decreasing earnings for the less educated. After the crisis, the increasing premium to education results from wages falling at a faster pace for the less educated than for college graduates. This result is robust to endogenous supply responses, selection, specification, changes in the functional form and to the inclusion of household fixed effects. I also find that rates of return to education are upward biased by up to 20 per cent by the omission of unobserved family background factors (i.e. family fixed effects). Surprisingly, after controlling for macroeconomic variables I still find a statistically and economically significant downward trend for all earnings, particularly those of primary completers.

Keywords: returns to schooling; earnings profiles; occupations; macroeconomic shocks; policy swings; Argentina (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2010-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-edu and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp4753.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:iza:izadps:dp4753

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().