The labour market returns to graduation: reconciling administrative and survey data estimates

Anna Adamecz, Matt Dickson and Nikki Shure

Economics of Education Review, 2025, vol. 108, issue C

Abstract: This paper contributes to the literature on the earnings returns to university graduation. Recent evidence using administrative earnings data from England suggests a zero return to graduation for men and positive returns to graduation for women in annual earnings at age 26. We show that once hours worked are taken into account – typically not available in administrative tax data – returns to graduation in hourly wages are considerably smaller for women than returns in annual wages at this age. Graduate women work more hours than comparable non-graduate women; thus, not taking hours worked into account leads to overestimating returns to graduation for women by more than two-fold. This highlights the importance of using both survey and administrative data sources when estimating the returns to university graduation.

Keywords: Returns to graduation; University; Gender differences; Survey data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 I26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775725000810
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ecoedu:v:108:y:2025:i:c:s0272775725000810

DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102701

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Education Review is currently edited by E. Cohn

More articles in Economics of Education Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().