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

Returns to education remain an important parameter of interest in economic analysis. A large literature estimates these returns, often carefully addressing issues such as selection into wage employment and endogeneity in terms of completed schooling. There has been much less exploration of whether t...

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Main Authors:	Serneels, Pieter, Beegle, Kathleen, Dillon, Andrew
Format:	Journal Article
Published:	Elsevier 2018
Subjects:	RETURNS TO EDUCATION SURVEY DESIGN FIELD EXPERIMENT DEVELOPMENT TEST BIAS GENDER
Online Access:	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29418

id	okr-10986-29418
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	okr-10986-294182021-05-25T10:54:44Z Do Returns to Education Depend on How and Whom You Ask? Serneels, Pieter Beegle, Kathleen Dillon, Andrew RETURNS TO EDUCATION SURVEY DESIGN FIELD EXPERIMENT DEVELOPMENT TEST BIAS GENDER Returns to education remain an important parameter of interest in economic analysis. A large literature estimates these returns, often carefully addressing issues such as selection into wage employment and endogeneity in terms of completed schooling. There has been much less exploration of whether the estimates of Mincerian returns depend on how information about wage work is collected. Relying on a survey experiment in Tanzania, this paper finds that estimates of the returns to education vary by questionnaire design, but not by whether the information on employment and wages is self-reported or collected by a proxy respondent. The differences derived from questionnaire type are substantial, varying from higher returns of 5 percentage points among the most well educated men to 16 percentage points among the least well educated women. These differences are at magnitudes similar to the bias in ordinary least squares estimation, which receives considerable attention in the literature. The findings demonstrate that survey design matters in the estimation of returns to schooling and that care is needed in comparing across contexts and over time, particularly if the data are generated through different surveys. 2018-03-01T17:33:16Z 2018-03-01T17:33:16Z 2017-10 Journal Article Economics of Education Review 0272-7757 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29418 CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo World Bank Elsevier Publications & Research :: Journal Article Publications & Research Africa Tanzania
repository_type	Digital Repository
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	Digital Repositories
building	World Bank Open Knowledge Repository
collection	World Bank
topic	RETURNS TO EDUCATION SURVEY DESIGN FIELD EXPERIMENT DEVELOPMENT TEST BIAS GENDER
spellingShingle	RETURNS TO EDUCATION SURVEY DESIGN FIELD EXPERIMENT DEVELOPMENT TEST BIAS GENDER Serneels, Pieter Beegle, Kathleen Dillon, Andrew Do Returns to Education Depend on How and Whom You Ask?
geographic_facet	Africa Tanzania
description	Returns to education remain an important parameter of interest in economic analysis. A large literature estimates these returns, often carefully addressing issues such as selection into wage employment and endogeneity in terms of completed schooling. There has been much less exploration of whether the estimates of Mincerian returns depend on how information about wage work is collected. Relying on a survey experiment in Tanzania, this paper finds that estimates of the returns to education vary by questionnaire design, but not by whether the information on employment and wages is self-reported or collected by a proxy respondent. The differences derived from questionnaire type are substantial, varying from higher returns of 5 percentage points among the most well educated men to 16 percentage points among the least well educated women. These differences are at magnitudes similar to the bias in ordinary least squares estimation, which receives considerable attention in the literature. The findings demonstrate that survey design matters in the estimation of returns to schooling and that care is needed in comparing across contexts and over time, particularly if the data are generated through different surveys.
format	Journal Article
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 Whom You Ask?
title_short	Do Returns to Education Depend on How and Whom You Ask?
title_full	Do Returns to Education Depend on How and Whom You Ask?
title_fullStr	Do Returns to Education Depend on How and Whom You Ask?
title_full_unstemmed	Do Returns to Education Depend on How and Whom You Ask?
title_sort	do returns to education depend on how and whom you ask?
publisher	Elsevier
publishDate	2018
url	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29418
_version_	1764469300618330112

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

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