Modelling cognitive skills, ability and school quality to explain labour market earnings differentials

Cobus Burger () and Servaas van der Berg ()

No 08/2011, Working Papers from Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Attempts to explain wage differences between race groups in South Africa are constrained by the fact that quality of education is known to differ greatly between groups, thus the unexplained portion of the wage gap may be much affected by such differences in education quality. Using a simulation model that utilises school-leaving (matric) examination results and educational attainment levels to generate estimates of education quality, we find that much of the wage gap can indeed be explained by differences in education quality. Thus the unexplained residual, often identified with labour market discrimination, usually greatly over-estimates such discrimination. This emphasises even more strongly the need for greater equity in educational outcomes, particularly in the often unobserved quality of education.

Keywords: South Africa; education quality; wages; labour market; Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition; discrimination; economics of education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 J31 J7 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-cbe, nep-cmp, 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://www.ekon.sun.ac.za/wpapers/2011/wp082011/wp-08-2011.pdf First version, 2011 (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:sza:wpaper:wpapers136

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Melt van Schoor ().