What good are skills, anyway? Estimating the returns to specific skills in a college education

Timothy J. Rakitan and Georgeanne Artz

No 205791, 2015 AAEA & WAEA Joint Annual Meeting, July 26-28, San Francisco, California from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: How does the labor market reward the specific skills learned by college students? We use a novel data set that combines earnings, demographic and college transcript data for over 5,000 graduates of a large university to investigate how their skill development has been compensated during their experience in the labor market. Using student academic records to generate measures of skills acquisition in the areas of mathematics and communication, among others, we estimate the contribution of our skills acquisition measures to graduates’ later incomes. We find that, consistent with established literature, the significance of even broad categories of skills diminishes as controls are added, although female graduates experience significant returns to quantitative coursework. These results are robust to different specifications, including controlling for innate ability via proxy measures.

Keywords: Labor; and; Human; Capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-hrm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/205791/files/R ... n%20Paper%206805.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:ags:aaea15:205791

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.205791

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2015 AAEA & WAEA Joint Annual Meeting, July 26-28, San Francisco, California from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().