IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/kob/dpaper/dp2021-09.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Decline in Values of Degrees and Recent Evolution of Wage Inequality: Evidence from Chile

Author

Listed:
  • Yoshimichi Murakami

    (Research Institute for Economics and Business Administration(RIEB), Kobe University, JAPAN)

  • Tomokazu Nomura

    (Faculty of Information Technology and Social Sciences, Osaka University of Economics, JAPAN)

Abstract

Using the latest available data from nationally representative household surveys, we analyze the association between changes in returns to higher education degrees and the evolution of wage inequality in Chile from 2013–2017. Employing a decomposition method using unconditional quantile regressions, we find that a significant decline in returns to professional degrees especially from new private universities, with a larger magnitude at upper quantiles, is associated with a substantial reduction in wage inequality, especially for younger graduates. The results are robust to the correction for sample selection bias, controlling for workers' occupation categories, and the choice of the analysis period.

Suggested Citation

  • Yoshimichi Murakami & Tomokazu Nomura, 2021. "Decline in Values of Degrees and Recent Evolution of Wage Inequality: Evidence from Chile," Discussion Paper Series DP2021-09, Research Institute for Economics & Business Administration, Kobe University, revised Mar 2022.
    • Handle: RePEc:kob:dpaper:dp2021-09
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.rieb.kobe-u.ac.jp/academic/ra/dp/English/DP2021-09.pdf
    File Function: Revised version, 2022
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Dante Contreras & Emerson Melo & Susana Ojeda, 2005. "¿Estimando el retorno a la educación o a los no observables?: evidencia de datos de panel," Estudios de Economia, University of Chile, Department of Economics, vol. 32(2 Year 20), pages 187-199, December.
    2. Gasparini, Leonardo & Galiani, Sebastian & Cruces, Guillermo & Acosta, Pablo A., 2011. "Educational Upgrading and Returns to Skills in Latin America: Evidence from a Supply-Demand Framework, 1990-2010," IZA Discussion Papers 6244, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    3. Raymundo M. Campos-Vazquez & Luis F. Lopez-Calva & Nora Lustig, 2015. "Declining Wages for College-Educated Workers in Mexico: Are Younger or Older Cohorts Hurt the Most?," Working Papers 1522, Tulane University, Department of Economics.
    4. Fortin, Nicole & Lemieux, Thomas & Firpo, Sergio, 2011. "Decomposition Methods in Economics," Handbook of Labor Economics, in: O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (ed.), Handbook of Labor Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 1, pages 1-102, Elsevier.
    5. Oaxaca, Ronald, 1973. "Male-Female Wage Differentials in Urban Labor Markets," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 14(3), pages 693-709, October.
    6. Adriana Camacho & Julián Messina & Juan Pablo Uribe, 2017. "The Expansion of Higher Education in Colombia: Bad Students or Bad Programs?," Documentos CEDE 15352, Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE.
    7. Orley Ashenfelter & David J. Zimmerman, 1997. "Estimates Of The Returns To Schooling From Sibling Data: Fathers, Sons, And Brothers," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 79(1), pages 1-9, February.
    8. Alan S. Blinder, 1973. "Wage Discrimination: Reduced Form and Structural Estimates," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 8(4), pages 436-455.
    9. Yoshimichi Murakami & Tomokazu Nomura, 2020. "Expanding higher education and wage inequality in Chile," Journal of Economic Studies, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 47(4), pages 877-889, February.
    10. Chumacero, Rómulo A. & Gómez, Daniel & Paredes, Ricardo D., 2011. "I would walk 500 miles (if it paid): Vouchers and school choice in Chile," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 30(5), pages 1103-1114, October.
    11. Jorge Rodríguez & Sergio Urzúa & Loreto Reyes, 2016. "Heterogeneous Economic Returns to Post-Secondary Degrees: Evidence from Chile," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 51(2), pages 416-460.
    12. Francisco Parro & Loreto Reyes, 2017. "The rise and fall of income inequality in Chile," Latin American Economic Review, Springer;Centro de Investigaciòn y Docencia Económica (CIDE), vol. 26(1), pages 1-31, December.
    13. Prathi Seneviratne, 2019. "Explaining changes in Sri Lanka’s wage distribution, 1992-2014: a quantile regression analysis," Oxford Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 47(2), pages 238-256, April.
    14. Daniel G—mez & R—mulo A. Chumacero & Ricardo D. Paredes, 2012. "School choice and information," Estudios de Economia, University of Chile, Department of Economics, vol. 39(2 Year 20), pages 143-157, December.
    15. Hofflinger, Alvaro & Gelber, Denisse & Tellez Cañas, Santiago, 2020. "School choice and parents’ preferences for school attributes in Chile," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 74(C).
    16. Binlei Gong, 2019. "Like father like son? Revisiting the role of parental education in estimating returns to education in China," Review of Development Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 23(1), pages 275-292, February.
    17. Knight, J B & Sabot, R H, 1983. "Educational Expansion and the Kuznets Effect," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 73(5), pages 1132-1136, December.
    18. Ana Maria Montoya & Carlos Noton & Alex Solis, 2017. "Returns to Higher Education: Vocational Education vs College," Documentos de Trabajo 334, Centro de Economía Aplicada, Universidad de Chile.
    19. David Coady & Allan Dizioli, 2018. "Income inequality and education revisited: persistence, endogeneity and heterogeneity," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 50(25), pages 2747-2761, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Ferreira,Francisco H. G. & Firpo,Sergio P. & Messina,Julian, 2017. "Ageing poorly? : accounting for the decline in earnings inequality in Brazil, 1995-2012," Policy Research Working Paper Series 8018, The World Bank.
    2. Jean-Marc Fournier & Isabell Koske, 2012. "The determinants of earnings inequality: evidence from quantile regressions," OECD Journal: Economic Studies, OECD Publishing, vol. 2012(1), pages 7-36.
    3. Jean-Marc Fournier & Isabell Koske, 2012. "Less Income Inequality and More Growth – Are they Compatible? Part 7. The Drivers of Labour Earnings Inequality – An Analysis Based on Conditional and Unconditional Quantile Regressions," OECD Economics Department Working Papers 930, OECD Publishing.
    4. Seneviratne, Prathi, 2020. "Gender wage inequality during Sri Lanka’s post-reform growth: A distributional analysis," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 129(C).
    5. Luis, Beccaria & Roxana, Maurizio & Vazquez, Gustavo, 2014. "Recent changes in wage inequality in Argentina. The role of labor formalization and other factors," MPRA Paper 56701, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Huong Thu Le & Ha Trong Nguyen, 2018. "The evolution of the gender test score gap through seventh grade: new insights from Australia using unconditional quantile regression and decomposition," IZA Journal of Labor Economics, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 7(1), pages 1-42, December.
    7. Katie Meara & Francesco Pastore & Allan Webster, 2020. "The gender pay gap in the USA: a matching study," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 33(1), pages 271-305, January.
    8. Sergio Longobardi & Margherita Maria Pagliuca & Andrea Regoli, 2018. "Can problem-solving attitudes explain the gender gap in financial literacy? Evidence from Italian students’ data," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 52(4), pages 1677-1705, July.
    9. Victor Chernozhukov & Iván Fernández‐Val & Blaise Melly, 2013. "Inference on Counterfactual Distributions," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 81(6), pages 2205-2268, November.
    10. Tymon Słoczyński, 2015. "The Oaxaca–Blinder Unexplained Component as a Treatment Effects Estimator," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 77(4), pages 588-604, August.
    11. James Cloyne & Òscar Jordà & Alan M. Taylor, 2020. "Decomposing the Fiscal Multiplier," Working Paper Series 2020-12, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
    12. Michaela Fuchs & Anja Rossen & Antje Weyh & Gabriele Wydra‐Somaggio, 2021. "Where do women earn more than men? Explaining regional differences in the gender pay gap," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 61(5), pages 1065-1086, November.
    13. Ramos, Raul & Sanromá, Esteban & Simón, Hipólito, 2022. "Collective bargaining levels, employment and wage inequality in Spain," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 44(2), pages 375-395.
    14. Mariusz Kaszubowski & Joanna Wolszczak-Derlacz, 2014. "Salary and reservation wage gender gaps in Polish academia," GUT FME Working Paper Series A 19, Faculty of Management and Economics, Gdansk University of Technology.
    15. Gabriel Montes-Rojas & Lucas Siga & Ram Mainali, 2017. "Mean and quantile regression Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions with an application to caste discrimination," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 15(3), pages 245-255, September.
    16. Luis Ayala & Javier Mart n-Rom n & Juan Vicente, 2023. "What Contributes to Rising Inequality in Large Cities?," LIS Working papers 850, LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg.
    17. Karmann, Alexander & Sugawara, Shinya, 2022. "Comparing the German and Japanese nursing home sectors: Implications of demographic and policy differences," CEPIE Working Papers 02/22, Technische Universität Dresden, Center of Public and International Economics (CEPIE).
    18. Sloczynski, Tymon, 2018. "A General Weighted Average Representation of the Ordinary and Two-Stage Least Squares Estimands," IZA Discussion Papers 11866, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    19. Pablo Lavado & Nelson Oviedo & Hernán Ruffo, 2016. "Destruction of Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills in Adulthood," Working Papers 16-07, Centro de Investigación, Universidad del Pacífico.
    20. Collischon Matthias, 2019. "Is There a Glass Ceiling over Germany?," German Economic Review, De Gruyter, vol. 20(4), pages 329-359, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Higher education; Returns to degree; Wage inequality;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I23 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Higher Education; Research Institutions
    • I24 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Education and Inequality
    • I26 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Returns to Education
    • J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kob:dpaper:dp2021-09. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Office of Promoting Research Collaboration, Research Institute for Economics & Business Administration, Kobe University (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/rikobjp.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.