There is much disagreement in the literature over the extent to which graduates are mismatched in the labour market and the reasons for this. In this paper we utilise the Flexible Professional in the Knowledge Society (REFLEX) data set to cast light on these issues, based on data for UK graduates. We find substantial pay penalties for…

This paper studies the incidence and consequences of the mismatch between formal education and the educational requirements of jobs in Estonia during the years 1997-2003. We find large wage penalties associated with the phenomenon of educational mismatch. Moreover, the incidence and wage penalty of mismatches increase with age. This suggests that…

This study addresses a prospective aspect of general education: through general education, people obtain information about returns to their future specific education, thereby enabling them to choose fields in which they excel. According to that property of education, this paper presents a theoretical framework as a basis for understanding effects…

Most public school districts in the United States use a salary schedule to determine compensation for teachers within the district. However, some school districts have implemented incentive pay schemes that allow flexibility at the school or even individual teacher level. These compensation schemes in some ways may more closely approximate a…

We report evidence that university reputation affects wages of bachelors in China. An unconditional difference between a top-100 university and a top 400-500 university of 23% is increased to some 28% by adding controls. Within the top-100 there is no differentiation in pay-off. Self-rated quality of high school, while affecting quality of…

I use data from the State University of New York to examine whether changes in community college attendance costs yield different impacts on first-time enrollment in different community college programs. Evidence is strong that academic-program enrollment significantly and substantially decreases when 2-year tuition increases, but weaker that it…

Aggregate unemployment may affect individual returns to education through qualification-specific responses in participation and wage bargaining. This paper shows that an increase in regional unemployment by 1% decreases returns to education by 0.005 percentage points. This implies that higher skilled employees are better sheltered from labour…

This paper studies the non-market effects of education on crime using a panel dataset for the 20 Italian regions over the period 1980-1995. Our empirical results suggest that education reduces crime over and above its effect through labour market opportunities (employment rate and wage rate). Because of the absence of a credible instrumental…

While there is an extensive literature on intergenerational transmission of economic outcomes (education, health and income for example), many of the pathways through which these outcomes are transmitted are not as well understood. We address this deficit by analysing the relationship between socio-economic status and child outcomes in university,…

This paper examines the effect of teacher relative wages and teacher wage dispersion on high school graduates' preferences for teaching majors in College. This approximation to teacher quality is appropriate in a country like Venezuela as opposed to the US since the rigidity of the tertiary school system significantly limits mobility between…

We consider the academic performance of Italian university graduates and their labor market position 3 years after graduation. Our data confirm the common finding that female students outperform male students in academia but are overcome in the labor market. Assuming that academic competition is fair and that individual talent is equally…

Previous research has established the returns to academic ability in the general labor market, and this paper investigates such returns in the teacher labor market. Using a nationally representative sample of public school teachers, I find that teachers who graduate from the most selective undergraduate institutions have salaries that are between…

Using data for 108 colleges in the California Community College System, this paper poses two questions. First, do California community colleges differ in their missions? Second, if they do, can inter-college differences in missions be explained? We address the first question by developing college-specific measures of curriculum mix, which we use…

We analyse the role of educational choice on the degree of occupational segregation in Trinidad and Tobago during a period in which educational policies intent on equating gender opportunities in education were implemented. To this end we utilize waves of the Trinidad and Tobago labour force survey over the period 1991-2004. Our results show that…

This paper uses the approach in the under/over education literature to analyze the extent of matching of educational level to occupational attainment among adult native born and foreign born men in the US, using the 2000 Census. Overeducation is found to be more common among recent labor market entrants, while undereducation is more likely among…