The Influence of Sectoral Minimum Wages on School Enrollment and Educational Choices: Evidence From Italy in the 1960s-1980s

Andrea Ramazzotti

CSEF Working Papers from Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy

Abstract: Do minimum wages influence post-compulsory school enrollment and educational choices? This paper studies the effect of sectorally-bargained minimum wages using a quasi-natural historical experiment from Italy around 1969, when labour unions obtained steep wage raises for manufacturing workers. Italy’s weakly-selective educational system—whereby students choose specialist educational curricula at age fourteen—allows to separately identify the impact on enrollment from that on educational choices. Absent microdata for the period under study, I present original estimates of education and labour-market variables at the province level with annual frequency between 1962 and 1982. Exploiting exogenous spatial variation in the intensity of the minimum wage hike between provinces with an instrumental variable approach and flexible Difference-in-Differences, I find a temporary increase in early school leaving and a permanent substitution away from vocational schools preparing for manufacturing jobs. The length of the adjustment might have caused a significant long-term loss for Italy’s human capital stock.

Keywords: Wage Differentials; Education; Schooling; Economic History: Europe post-1913. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 J31 N34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-06-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-his, nep-lma and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.csef.it/WP/wp717.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:sef:csefwp:717

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CSEF Working Papers from Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dr. Maria Carannante ().