TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Budría, Santiago
AU  - Pereira, Pedro T.
        TI  - Educational Qualifications and Wage Inequality: Evidence for Europe
        PY  - 2005/Sep/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 1763
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp1763
        AB  - This paper explores the connection between education and wage inequality in nine European
countries. We exploit the quantile regression technique to calculate returns to lower
secondary, upper secondary and tertiary education at different points of the wage distribution.
We find that returns to tertiary education are highly increasing when moving from the lower to
the upper quantiles. This finding suggests that an educational expansion towards tertiary
education is expected, ceteris paribus, to increase overall wage inequality through the withindimension.
Returns to secondary education are more homogeneous across quantiles, thus
suggesting that an educational expansion towards secondary education is expected to have
a more limited impact on within-groups dispersion. Using data from the last decades, we
assess how the impact of education on wage inequality has evolved over time. We detect
different trends across countries. A common feature is that the inequality increasing effect of
tertiary education became more acute over the last years.
        KW  - wage inequality
KW  - quantile regression
KW  - returns to education
        ER  -