Do Returns to Education Depend on How and Who You Ask?

Returns to education remain an important parameter of interest in economic analysis. A large literature estimates returns to education in the labor market, often carefully addressing issues such as selection, into wage employment and in terms of co...

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Main Authors:	Serneels, Pieter, Beegle, Kathleen, Dillon, Andrew
Format:	Working Paper
Language:	English en_US
Published:	World Bank, Washington, DC 2016
Subjects:	returns to education survey design field experiment development
Online Access:	http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2016/07/26579299/returns-education-depend-ask http://hdl.handle.net/10986/24827

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recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	okr-10986-248272021-04-23T14:04:27Z Do Returns to Education Depend on How and Who You Ask? Serneels, Pieter Beegle, Kathleen Dillon, Andrew returns to education survey design field experiment development Returns to education remain an important parameter of interest in economic analysis. A large literature estimates returns to education in the labor market, often carefully addressing issues such as selection, into wage employment and in terms of completed schooling. There has been much less exploration of whether estimated returns are robust to survey design. Specifically, do returns to education differ depending on how information about wage work is collected? Using a survey experiment in Tanzania, this paper investigates whether survey methods matter for estimating mincerian returns to education. The results show that estimated returns vary by questionnaire design, but not by whether the information on employment and wages is self-reported or collected by a proxy respondent (another household member). The differences due to questionnaire type are substantial varying from 6 percentage points higher returns to education for the highest educated men, to 14 percentage points higher for the least educated women, after allowing for non-linearity and endogeneity in the estimation of these parameters. These differences are of similar magnitudes as the bias in OLS estimation, which receives considerable attention in the literature. The findings underline that survey design matters for the estimation of structural parameters, and that care is needed when comparing across contexts and over time, in particular when data is generated by different surveys. 2016-08-09T16:44:49Z 2016-08-09T16:44:49Z 2016-07 Working Paper http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2016/07/26579299/returns-education-depend-ask http://hdl.handle.net/10986/24827 English en_US Policy Research Working Paper;No. 7747 CC BY 3.0 IGO http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/igo/ World Bank World Bank, Washington, DC Publications & Research Publications & Research :: Policy Research Working Paper Africa Tanzania
repository_type	Digital Repository
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	Digital Repositories
building	World Bank Open Knowledge Repository
collection	World Bank
language	English en_US
topic	returns to education survey design field experiment development
spellingShingle	returns to education survey design field experiment development Serneels, Pieter Beegle, Kathleen Dillon, Andrew Do Returns to Education Depend on How and Who You Ask?
geographic_facet	Africa Tanzania
relation	Policy Research Working Paper;No. 7747
description	Returns to education remain an important parameter of interest in economic analysis. A large literature estimates returns to education in the labor market, often carefully addressing issues such as selection, into wage employment and in terms of completed schooling. There has been much less exploration of whether estimated returns are robust to survey design. Specifically, do returns to education differ depending on how information about wage work is collected? Using a survey experiment in Tanzania, this paper investigates whether survey methods matter for estimating mincerian returns to education. The results show that estimated returns vary by questionnaire design, but not by whether the information on employment and wages is self-reported or collected by a proxy respondent (another household member). The differences due to questionnaire type are substantial varying from 6 percentage points higher returns to education for the highest educated men, to 14 percentage points higher for the least educated women, after allowing for non-linearity and endogeneity in the estimation of these parameters. These differences are of similar magnitudes as the bias in OLS estimation, which receives considerable attention in the literature. The findings underline that survey design matters for the estimation of structural parameters, and that care is needed when comparing across contexts and over time, in particular when data is generated by different surveys.
format	Working Paper
author	Serneels, Pieter Beegle, Kathleen Dillon, Andrew
author_facet	Serneels, Pieter Beegle, Kathleen Dillon, Andrew
author_sort	Serneels, Pieter
title	Do Returns to Education Depend on How and Who You Ask?
title_short	Do Returns to Education Depend on How and Who You Ask?
title_full	Do Returns to Education Depend on How and Who You Ask?
title_fullStr	Do Returns to Education Depend on How and Who You Ask?
title_full_unstemmed	Do Returns to Education Depend on How and Who You Ask?
title_sort	do returns to education depend on how and who you ask?
publisher	World Bank, Washington, DC
publishDate	2016
url	http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2016/07/26579299/returns-education-depend-ask http://hdl.handle.net/10986/24827
_version_	1764457753913327616

Do Returns to Education Depend on How and Who You Ask?

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