TY  - JOUR
AU  - Malamud,Ofer
AU  - Pop-Eleches,Cristian
TI  - General Education vs. Vocational Training: Evidence from an Economy in Transition
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14155
PY  - 2008
Y2  - July 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14155
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14155.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Ofer Malamud
Harris School of Public Policy Studies
University of Chicago
1155 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Tel: 773/702-3382
Fax: 773/702-0926
E-Mail: malamud@uchicago.edu

Cristian Pop-Eleches
Columbia University
SIPA and Economics Department
1022 International Affairs Building, MC 3308
420 West 118th Street
New York, NY 10027
Tel: 212/854-4476
Fax: 212/854-8059
E-Mail: cp2124@columbia.edu
AB  - This paper examines the relative benefits of general education and vocational training in Romania, a country which experienced major technological and institutional change during its transition from Communism to a market economy. To avoid the bias caused by non-random selection, we exploit a 1973 educational reform that shifted a large proportion of students from vocational training to general education while keeping average years of schooling unchanged. Using data from the 1992 and 2002 Romanian Censuses and household surveys from 1995-2000, we analyze the effect of this policy with a regression discontinuity design. We find that men in cohorts affected by the policy were significantly less likely to work in manual or craft-related occupations than their counterparts who were unaffected by the policy. However, in contrast to cross-sectional findings, we find no difference in labor market participation or earnings between cohorts affected and unaffected by the policy. We therefore conclude that differences in labor market returns between graduates of vocational and general schools are largely driven by selection.
ER  -