Persistence Bias and Schooling Returns

A well-established empirical literature suggests that individual wages are persistent. Several theoretical arguments support this empirical finding. Yet, the standard approach to the estimation of schooling returns does not account for this fact. This paper investigates the consequences of disregarding earnings persistence. In particular, it shows that the most commonly used static-model estimators of schooling coefficients are subject to an omitted-variable bias which can be named persistence bias.