education. We therefore include aggregate unemployment and an interaction term between unemployment and the individual education … to education by 0.005 percentage points. This implies that higher skilled employees are better sheltered from labour … regional unemployment can in addition almost fully explain the observed large differences in regional returns to education. We …

The validity of family background variables instrumenting education in income regressions has been much criticized. In … violations of the strong validity assumption affect the estimation results. We show that, in case of moderate direct effects of … (perfect validity of the instrument). The size of the bias is in many cases smaller than the standard error of education …

We address the impact of education upon wage inequality by drawing on evidence from fifteen European countries, during … regressions of Mincer equations and analysing the differences in returns to education across the wage distribution and across time …. Four different patterns emerge: 1) a positive and increasing contribution of education upon within-levels wage inequality …

Using information on family background, we estimate returns to education, allowing for the heterogeneity of returns. In … earn lower wages, but have higher returns to education. This supports the view that persons from less-educated backgrounds …