Wage penalties for post-secondary education interruption in France

Inès Albandea (1)

1 IREDU - Institut de recherche sur l'éducation : Sociologie et Economie de l'Education

In France, more and more young people are interrupting their post-secondary education (Mora, 2014) even if re-entering higher education implies all kinds of costs. Yet, little attention has been given so far to the eect of temporary dropout on future wages but it has been studied in other countries. We have attempted to measure the net effect of schooling discontinuities on young wages on the basis of a study of a sample of youth who left post-secondary education in 1998 and returned a few years later. Firstly, from an OLS regression, temporary interruption seems to have a positive effect on wages. However, people who interrupted temporary their education could have characteristics that employers value better in the labour market. However, there is a potential endogeneity of schooling and variable reflecting the education interruption should not be ignored when examining its impact on wages. Non-lienar pathway may be correlated with unobserved variables such as ability or motivation that in turn inuence wages. We will attempt to correct the endogeneity bias with instrumental variable and fixed effects model.

Mots clés: Wage penalty; post-secondary education; interruption; France

Domaines: Education

Inès Albandea. Wage penalties for post-secondary education interruption in France. The XXVI meeting of the Economics of Education Association (AEDE), Economics of Education Association (AEDE), Jun 2017, Murcia, Spain. ⟨halshs-01614312⟩