This article summarises the recent literature on the relationship between inequality in wages and education for Portugal. The main conclusions are the following. First, Portu-gal is one of the OECD countries with lowest educational level. At the same time, re-turns to education are large, and...

This article focuses on the contributions from the emerging positivist epistemological approach, endorsed by the economics of language and the economics of education, to study the returns to language skills, assuming that language competencies constitute key components of human capital. It...

The estimation of the economic return to education has perhaps been one of the predominant areas of analysis in applied economics for over 50 years. In this short note we consider some of the recent directions taken by the literature, and also some of the blockages faced by both science and...

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 in most...

In this paper we apply a semi-parametric approach (quantile regression - QR) to the last 2007 wave of the EU-SILC data set, in order to explore the connection between education and wage inequality in 8 European countries. We find that wages increase with education and this holds true across the...

In this paper we investigate whether inequality in the inter-industry wage premia may be explained by unobserved differences in workers’ educational skills. We use the 2007 EU-SILC data set for Portugal, a nation which can be considered a case-study, due to its high inter-industry wage...

Low birth weight has considerable short and long-term consequences and leads to high costs to the individual and society even in a developed economy. Low birth weight is partially a consequence of choices made by the mother pre- and during pregnancy. Thus policies affecting these choices could...

Mental illness is associated with large costs to individuals and society. Education improves various health outcomes but little work has been done on mental illness. To obtain unbiased estimates of the effect of education on mental health, we rely on a rich longitudinal dataset that contains...

Low birth weight has considerable short and long-term consequences and leads to high costs to the individual and society even in a developed economy. Low birth weight is partially a consequence of choices made by the mother pre- and during pregnancy. Thus policies affecting these choices could...

In this paper we explore the connection between education and wage inequality in Spain for the period 1994-2001. Drawing on quantile regression, we describe the conditional wage distribution of different populations groups. We find that higher education is associated with higher wage dispersion....