Estimados Académicos y Académicas FEN,

Les extendemos la invitación al seminario que organiza el Departamento de Economía, en el que se presentará el trabajo titulado "College and wage gaps: The roles of selection, sortage and differential returns".

Expone: Juan José Matta, Profesor, Departamento de Economía, UDP.

Co-autores: Josefa Aguirre y Raquel Fernández.

Abstract: In this paper we investigate the contribution of college to wage gaps. We link administrative data on college and labor earnings from Chile and document significant wage gaps by gender and social origin among former college students. These gaps remain after conditioning on college admission test scores as well as on attended major and college. Taking advantage of discontinuities built-in in Chile’s centralized college admission system, we obtain value-added estimates for nearly 1,000 college-major combinations (i.e., programs,) separately for students of different genders and social origins. We find that women and first-generation college students benefit less from college than men and students with college-educated parents. Overall, college explains about 60% of the total gender wage gap and 50% of social wage gaps among college graduates. We further decompose these effects between sorting and differential returns in a Oaxaca-Blinder fashion. In contrast to a widespread view, we find that sorting plays a minor role in generating gender wage gaps. Moreover, first-generation college students typically attend higher value-added programs, which attenuates the contribution of college to social wage gaps. Most of College’s contribution to wage gaps is driven by gender and social differences in the returns to the same college programs.

El formato será presencial y el seminario se desarrollará en la Sala P-304.

Saludos cordiales,

Dirección de Investigación