Signaling Specific Skills and the Labor Market of College Graduates

Matias Busso, Sebastián Montaño and Juan Muñoz-Morales ()
Additional contact information
Juan Muñoz-Morales: LEM - Lille économie management - UMR 9221 - UA - Université d'Artois - UCL - Université catholique de Lille - ULCO - Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale - Université de Lille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Using administrative data and a regression discontinuity design, we study the labor market effects of a government-sponsored award given to top-performing students on Colombia's national college exit exam. The award signals field-specific skills, leading recipients to earn seven to ten percent more than comparable peers without the signal. The benefits are concentrated among graduates from lowerreputation institutions, who enter the market with weaker signals and gain access to better job matches and higher-paying firms. These returns persist for up to five years, driven by an upward shift in the intercept of the wage-experience profile of those with weaker signals.

Keywords: Colombia; college reputation; awards; wage returns; skills; Signaling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-10-27
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05490569v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Review of Economics and Statistics, 2025, pp.1-46. ⟨10.1162/REST.a.1635⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-05490569v1/document (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:hal:journl:hal-05490569

DOI: 10.1162/REST.a.1635

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().