NBER Working Papers by Lei Zhang

Policy debates about the balance of vocational and general education programs focus on the school-to-work transition. But with rapid technological change, gains in youth employment from vocational education may be offset by less adaptability and thus diminished employment later in life. To test our main hypothesis that any relative labor-market advantage of vocational education decreases with age, we employ a difference-in-differences approach that compares employment rates across different ages for people with general and vocational education. Using micro data for 18 countries from the International Adult Literacy Survey, we find strong support for the existence of such a trade-off, which is most pronounced in countries emphasizing apprenticeship programs. Results are robust to accoun...

Returns to education are traditionally estimated in a Mincer wage equation from the variation in schooling for a cross-section of individuals of different ages. Because individuals receive education at different time periods, when the quality of their education may not be identical, this method leads to an over- or under-estimation of the return to education of a given quality depending on how education quality evolves over time. This quality issue interacts with ability bias from self-selection into schooling and is particularly problematic when comparing returns across different countries. Using microdata from the International Adult Literacy Survey, we construct quality adjusted measures of schooling attained at different time periods and use these along with international literacy tes...