Are School-Provided Skills Useful at Work? Results of the Wiles Test

Jacek Liwiński and Francesco Pastore

Research in Higher Education, 2021, vol. 62, issue 1, No 4, 72-97

Abstract: Abstract We test for the signaling hypothesis versus the human capital theory using the Wiles test in a country which has experienced a dramatic increase in the supply of skills in a relatively short period of time. For this purpose, we construct a job match index based on the usefulness of school-provided skills and the relevance of the job performed to the field of study. Then, we regress the first earnings of graduates on this index using OLS. The data we use come from a representative tracer survey of Poles who left secondary schools or graduated from higher education institutions over the period of 1998–2005. We find that only the graduates from higher education institutions obtain a wage premium from skills acquired in the course of formal education. This finding is robust to a number of robustness checks with different indicators of educational mismatch and instrumental variables.

Keywords: Education; Skills; Signaling; Job matching; Wages; Wiles test; Poland (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11162-019-09569-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: Are School-Provided Skills Useful at Work? Results of the Wiles Test (2017)
Working Paper: Are school-provided skills useful at work? Results of the Wiles test (2017)
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:spr:reihed:v:62:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1007_s11162-019-09569-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/11162

DOI: 10.1007/s11162-019-09569-5

Access Statistics for this article

Research in Higher Education is currently edited by Robert K. Toutkoushian

More articles in Research in Higher Education from Springer, Association for Institutional Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().