Evolution of private returns to tertiary education during transition: evidence from Slovenia

This article analyses the evolution of private returns to tertiary education during the period of transition from a socialist to a market economy using the personal income tax data of all Slovenian workers employed between 1994 and 2008. We document a rich interplay between supply and demand in the labour markets of high school and university graduates. We show that, in spite of significant increases in the labour supply, the demand for university graduates outweighed this and increased the rates of return in the early period of transition (1994--2001), while in the later period (2001--08) the opposite was the case. We also provide evidence of considerable heterogeneity in rates of return between genders, levels and fields of study, with particularly large (low) returns to the fields that were suppressed (favoured) during socialism. These initial differences in returns have, however, gradually declined.