The effect of geographical mobility, college quality and career interruptions on the returns to education

在当前的信息经济中，人力资本与个体劳动力市场的视角高度相关，教育回报的大小已成为教育经济学研究的经典话题。根据这份文献，接受一年额外教育的平均回报是收入增加约10%。然而，教育的回报因具体情况和个人特点而异。因此，调查哪些因素导致教育回报的差异应该会产生有趣和相关的新见解。在这个项目中，我们希望利用国家教育小组研究(NINS)成人调查中不同寻常的丰富地理和传记信息，从几个超越计算平均、学科和学位具体回报的角度来估计教育回报。在第一部分中，我们考察了地理流动与教育回报之间的关系。特别是，我们调查了毕业生流动性较高可以解释教育回报的比例。在第二阶段，我们希望通过利用有关最近大学质量的现有信息，作为衡量实际大学质量的工具，首次评估德国大学质量的回报。第三个研究目标是衡量育儿假和强制性服务等职业中断对重返教育的影响。

In the current information-based economies, human capital is highly relevant for individual labour market perspectives and the size of the returns to education has become a classical topic in economics of education research. According to this literature, the average return to one year of additional education is an increase in income of around 10%. However, the returns to education vary with specific circumstances and individual characteristics. Investigating which factors contribute to differences in returns to education should therefore yield interesting and relevant new insights.In this project we would like to exploit the unusual wealth of geographical and biographical information of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) adult surveys to estimate returns to education from several perspectives that go beyond calculating average, subject and degree-specific returns. In a first part, we investigate the relation between geographical mobility and returns to education. In particular, we investigate what share of the returns to education can be explained by higher mobility of graduates. In a second stage, we want to assess the returns to college quality in Germany for the first time by exploiting available information on the quality of the nearest university as an instrument for actual college quality. A third research objective is to measure the effect of career interruptions such as parental leave and mandatory service on returns to education.