Differences in Wage Growth by Education Level: Do Less-Educated Workers Gain Less from Work Experience?

Helen C. Connolly () and Peter Gottschalk ()

No 2331, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Abstract: This paper revisits the old question of whether wage growth differs by education level. Do more educated workers invest more than less educated workers in firm specific, sector specific or general human capital? Do they gain more from improved job match? The paper makes both a methodological and a substantive contribution by offering an alternative strategy for separately identifying returns to general experience, sector specific experience, firm tenure, and job match. Our empirical results, based on the Survey of Income and Program Participation, show that overall wage growth is higher for more-educated workers. This reflects higher returns to general experience for college graduates and higher returns to sector experience for high school graduates. Improvements in job match grow monotonically with education.

Keywords: low wage workers; returns to tenure; sector experience; general experience; job match (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-ltv
Date: 2006-09
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://repec.iza.org/RePEc/Discussionpaper/dp2331.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Differences in Wage Growth by Education Level: Do Less Educated Workers Gain Less from Work Experience? (2006)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp2331

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 for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Address: IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Mark Fallak ().