Education_And_Wages

Education And Wages Does Education Reduce Wage Inequality' Quantile Regression Evidence From Sixteen Countries* (7 October 2002) Pedro Silva Martins1 University of Warwick Pedro Telhado Pereira 2 Universidade da Madeira, CEPR and IZA Abstract: Quantile regression estimates of returns to education are used to address the relation between schooling and wage inequality. Empirical evidence for male workers from sixteen countries for the mid-1990’s suggests a robust stylised fact: Returns to schooling are higher for the more skilled individuals, conditional on their observable characteristics. This suggests that schooling has a positive impact upon within-levels wage inequality. Factors such as overeducation, ability-schooling interactions and school quality or different fields of study may be driving this result. Keywords: Returns to Education, Wage Inequality, Quantile Regression JEL codes: C29, J31, I21 * This paper was written under the scope of the 15-country ‘PuRE - Public Funding and Private Returns to Education’ European Commission TSER project. The results presented here are based on work done by country teams headed by Mahmood Arai, Rita Asplund, Erling Barth, Giorgio Brunello, Colm Harmon, Joop Odink, Pedro Pereira, José Luis Raymond, Ali Skalli, Viktor Steiner, Panagiotis Tsakloglou, Ian Walker, Niels Westergaard- Nielsen, Rudolf Winter-Ebmer and Stefan Wolter. We also thank participants at several seminars and a referee and the associate editor for comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies. 1 Corresponding author. Email: p.martins@warwick.ac.uk. Phone: returns, wage, regression, quantile, inequality, conditional, schooling, section, distribution, ln, education, within-levels, variables, research, private, paper, exogenous, educational, differences, dependent, data, country, countries, approach, analysed, written, vector, variable, upon, under, th, tecnologia, support, suggests, skilled, sets