Fluctuations in the wage gap between vocational and general secondary education: lessons from Portugal

Joop Hartog, Pedro Raposo and Hugo Reis

No 769, GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO)

Abstract: We document and analyse the wage gap between vocational and general secondary education in Portugal between 1994 and 2013. As Portuguese workers have been educated in different school systems, we have to distinguish birth cohorts. Analysing the wage gaps within cohorts, we find no support for the human capital prediction of crossing wage profiles and no support either for the hypothesis that general graduates increasingly outperform vocational graduates in late career. We discover that the lifecycle wage profiles have shifted over time. We link the pattern of shifting cohort profiles to changes in the school system and in the structure of labour demand. We conclude that assessing the relative value of vocational education requires to assess how the vocational curriculum responds to changes in economic structure and technology. We show that the decline in assortative matching between workers and firms has benefitted vocationally educated workers.

Keywords: returns to education; vocational wage gap; worker-firm allocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I26 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Journal Article: Fluctuations in the wage gap between vocational and general secondary education: lessons from Portugal (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:glodps:769

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