This study investigates the incidence of over-education amongst recent Australian bachelor degree graduates and its effect on their earnings. We find that between 24% and 37% of graduates were over-educated shortly after course completion, with over-education most common amongst young females and least common amongst older females. Over-education…

By using unique survey data, we conduct a detailed study of the gender salary gap within economics departments in Japan. Despite the presence of rigid pay scales emphasizing age and experience, there is a 7% gender salary gap after controlling for rank and detailed personal, job, institutional and human capital characteristics. This gender salary…

In this article, we examine the effect of incorporating the fields of study on the explained and unexplained components of the standard Oaxaca decomposition for the gender wage gaps in Taiwan using 1997-2003 Manpower Utilization Survey data. Using several existing and lately developed measures, we inspect the gender wage gap by college major to…

Studies examining the wage effect of overeducation have generated very consistent results. Their findings suggest that, for workers with similar educational attainment, workers who are overeducated for the job suffer from significant wage penalties. However, most studies use cross-sectional data, implicitly assuming that workers are randomly…

This paper proposes a theoretical framework where "within graduates" wage inequality is related to overeducation/educational mismatch in the labor market. We show that wage inequality may arise because of inefficient self-selection into education in the presence of ability-complementary technological progress and asymmetric information…

Most empirical teacher attrition research focuses on estimating the effect of either the alternate occupation opportunities or the teacher work environment on teacher attrition. In this paper, we use non-teaching wages of former teachers to estimate the determinants of teacher attrition, including the wage differential between teaching and…

Using a survey of a cohort of UK graduates, linked to administrative data on higher education participation, this paper investigates the labour market attainment of recent graduates by subject of study. We document a large heterogeneity in the mean wages of graduates from different subjects and a considerably larger one within subject with…

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…

In this paper, data from the Baccalaureate & Beyond 93/97/03 survey is used to estimate the effects on the earnings of scholarship athletics participants subsequent to graduation. Former college athletes are found to have higher wages on average. Upon first glance, colleges and universities could use these results to argue on behalf of investments…

The share of female teachers in the U.S. with an MA more than doubled between 1970 and 2000. This increase is puzzling, as it is much larger than that of other college-educated women, and it occurred over a period of declining teacher aptitude. I estimate the contribution of changes in teacher demographic characteristics, increases in the returns…

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…

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…

College students select majors for a variety of reasons, including expected returns in the labor market. This paper demonstrates an empirical method linking a census of US degrees and fields of study with measures of the knowledge content of jobs. The study combines individual wage and employment data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) with…

This study examines the role of sheepskin effects in explaining white-black earnings differences. The study finds significant differences in sheepskin effects between white men and black men, with white men receiving higher rewards for lower level signals (degrees of a college education or less) and black men receiving higher rewards for higher…