Low Wage Returns to Schooling in a Developing Country: Evidence from a Major Policy Reform in Turkey
利用土耳其1997年义务教育改革带来的外生变化，采用模糊断点回归设计估计了年轻男女的教育回报率，发现女性约为7-8%，男性仅为2-2.5%，远低于其他发展中国家。
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.