Low wage returns to schooling in a developing country: evidence from a major policy reform in Turkey

Aydemir, Abdurrahman Bekir and Kırdar, Murat G. (2017) Low wage returns to schooling in a developing country: evidence from a major policy reform in Turkey. (Accepted/In Press)

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Abstract

In this paper, we estimate returns to schooling for young men and women in Turkey using the exogenous and substantial variation in schooling across birth cohorts brought about by the 1997 reform of compulsory schooling within a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. We estimate that the return from an extra year of schooling is about 7-8% for women and an imprecisely estimated 2-2.5% for men. The low level of the estimates for men contrasts starkly with those estimated for other developing countries. We identify several reasons why returns to schooling are low for men and why they are higher for women in our context. In particular, the policy alters the schooling distributions of men and women differently, thus the average causal effect puts a higher weight on the causal effect of schooling at higher grade levels for women than for men.
Item Type: Article
Subjects: H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory
Divisions: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences > Academic programs > Economics
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Depositing User: Abdurrahman Aydemir
Date Deposited: 18 May 2017 11:37
Last Modified: 15 Sep 2017 16:06
URI: https://research.sabanciuniv.edu/id/eprint/32225

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