Estimates of the Causal Effects of Education on Earnings over the Lifecycle with Cohort Effects and Endogenous Education

This paper acknowledges that the relationship between log wages and schooling is considerably more complex than the simple human capital earnings function suggests and that schooling is endogenous. We estimate a model where educational attainment is discrete and ordered and log wages are determined by a simple function of work experience for each level of attainment. We distinguish between lifecycle and cohort effects by exploiting the fact that we have a short panel. We strongly reject both the usual separability assumption and exogeneity of educational attainment.