The 1990's was a turbulent period for Finnish postgraduate education. The education system was reformed and the number of postgraduate students who graduated every year increased at a fast pace. In this thesis doctorate and licentiate degree holders as a group, as well as how their labour market...

This paper analyses the determinants of participation in higher education in West Germany. In particular, the role of social origin as well as of expectations regarding the labour market outcome of a higher education degree and of public educational policy are examined. The estimations are based...

Over the last decade, many countries have experienced dramatic increases in university enrolment, which, when not matched by compensating increases in other inputs, have resulted in larger class sizes. Using administrative records from a leading UK university, we present evidence on the effects...

In this paper we evaluate the changes in the times-to-degree at the Finnish universities in the 1990s. In particular, we evaluate the effect of the 1992 student aid reform that was intended to shorten the duration of university studies. We find that the student aid reform had only a modest...

This paper provides estimates of the short-term individual returns to Higher Education (HE) in the United Kingdom, focusing on the effects of attending HE on the labour market outcomes for dropouts. Results show differential labour market outcomes for dropouts vs. individuals who have never...

This paper estimates the effects on earnings of “gap years” between high school and university enrollment. The effect is estimated by means of standard earnings functions augmented to account for gap years and a rich set of control variables using administrative Swedish data. We find that...

This paper provides evidence of heterogeneity in the returns to higher education in the UK. Attending the most prestigious universities leads to a wage premium of up to 6% for males. The rise in participation in higher education also led to a greater sorting of students and an increase in the...

In this paper, we estimate the rate of return to first degrees, masters degrees and PhDs in Britain using data from the Labour Force Survey. We estimate returns to broad subject groups and more narrowly defined disciplines, distinguishing returns by gender and attempting to control for...

This study addresses the question: Are workers who hold a university degree increasingly filling job openings meant for people with lower levels of schooling? It focuses on Portugal, where the higher education system has been expanding at a fast pace and the share of university graduates in...

We estimate selection and sorting effects on the evolution of the private return to schooling for college graduates during China?s between 1988 and 2002. We pay special attention to the changing role of sorting by ability versus budget-constraint effects as China?s education policy has changed...