Economic Returns to Education in France: OLS and Instrumental Variable Estimations

Abstract

This article estimates the economic returns to schooling as well as analyzing other explanatory factors for the French labor market. It addresses the issue of endogeneity bias and proposes two new instruments for use in the instrumental variable two-stage least squares technique. Our results show that the proposed instruments are relevant and adequate, based on evidence from the available literature. After using the proposed instruments, we find that the OLS coefficients for schooling are biased downwards. Finally, we choose between the two proposed instruments.