Earnings effects of adult secondary education in Sweden

In Sweden adult secondary education (ASE) has been offered since 1968, but we know little about its labour market effects. ASE offers courses at the compulsory and upper secondary level and is aimed to give adults who lack these types of education. This paper provides the first long-run annual earnings effect of participating in ASE using unique longitudinal individual data, the LINDA database. Controlling for pre-programme annual earnings, the estimates suggest that participating in adult secondary education significantly reduces the earnings of Swedish males with about 3.5 percent compared to non-participants. No effects are found for Swedish females, but the results indicate weakly significant positive effects, about 9 percent, for female immigrants.