Zero Returns to Compulsory Schooling in Germany: Evidence and Interpretation

By Jrn-Steffen Pischke, Till M. von Wachter. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2008

325 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We estimate the impact of compulsory schooling on earnings using changes in compulsory schooling laws in West Germany after World War II. Most estimates in the literature indicate returns in the range of 10 to 15. While our research design is very similar to studies for various other countries, we find a zero return. We find no evidence that this is due to labor market institutions or the apprenticeship training system in Germany. The result might be due to the fact that the basic skills most relevant for the labor market are learned earlier in Germany than in other countries.

Subfields: Demography, Education, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc1b7de1beb6153f5876efa1f681b6a8b886e90a

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Citations in the corpus

• Earnings Returns to the British Education Expansion. (2011, background): “Pons and Gonzalo (2002) use availability of a college in the province to look at the returns to schooling for male workers in Spain.”
• The effect of education on poverty: A European perspective (2021, background): “The conventional test for weak instruments is the rule of thumb by Staiger and Stock (1997) according to which instruments are weak when the first-stage F-statistic is less than 10.”