Education and earnings: how immigrants perform across the earnings distribution in Spain

Pablo Swedberg () and Santiago Budria Rodriguez ()
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Pablo Swedberg: Saint Louis University

Chapter 42 in Investigaciones de Economía de la Educación, 2015, vol. 10, pp 829-842 from Asociación de Economía de la Educación

Abstract: This paper explores the impact of educational attainment on immigrant earnings in Spain using a Quantile Regression approach. Most of the previous research on the impact schooling on earnings has focused on the mean effect neglecting the discrepancies that arise from unobserved heterogeneity. The paper uses the Spanish National Immigrant Survey (NIS), a large-scale immigration survey released by the Spanish National Statistics Institute. We find that the return to higher education is on average roughly 17%. Interestingly, the impact is twice as strong (20.7%) for immigrants at the top two quintile(s) of the conditional earnings distribution than for those at the bottom of the distribution (10%). This result suggests that the benefits derived from higher education are particularly relevant for individuals with stronger unobserved abilities and marketable skills. By contrast, individuals in the middle and particularly lower quintiles fail to reap a significant return. The large degree of heterogeneity in the returns to schooling found in our research suggests that higher education may be less effective among specific population groups.

Keywords: Returns to education; Quantile regression; Wage inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C29 D31 I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
ISBN: 978-84-944483-4-8
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