Search results

Education system stimulates the development of human capital and provides informative signaling allowing to differentiate productivity of individuals. If education system is efficient then higher levels of education usually associated with greater returns on labor market. To evaluate the efficiency of Russian education system we aim to estimate the effect of vocational education and different levels of higher education on wages.

We use data on 8,764 individuals in the years 2019–2021. Our statistical approach addresses two critical issues: nonrandom selection into employment and the endogeneity of education choice. To tackle these problems, we employed Heckman’s method and its extension that is a structural model which addresses the issue of self-selection into different levels of education.

The results of the analysis suggest that there is a significant heterogeneity in the returns to different levels of education. First, higher education, in general, offers substantial wage premiums when compared to vocational education. Specifically, individuals with specialist’s and bachelor’s degrees enjoy higher wage premiums of approximately 23.59–24.04% and 16.43–16.49%, respectively, compared to those with vocational education. Furthermore, we observe a significant dis-parity in returns among the various levels of higher education. Master’s degree provides a substantial wage premium in comparison to both bachelor’s (19.79–20.96%) and specialist’s (12.64–13.41%) degrees. Moreover, specialist degree offers a 7.16–7.55% higher wage premium than bachelor’s degree.

We identify a hierarchical pattern in the returns associated with different levels of higher education in Russia, specifically “bachelor-specialist-master.” These findings indicate that each level of education in Russia serves as a distinct signal in the labor market, facilitating employers' ability to differentiate between workers. From a policy perspective, our results suggest the potential benefits of offering opportunities to transition from specialist’s to master’s degrees on a tuition-free basis. Such a policy may enhance access to advanced education and potentially lead to higher returns for individuals in the labor market.

There are many studies on returns to higher education in Russia. However, just few of them estimate the returns to different levels of higher education. Also, these studies usually do not address the issue of the endogeneity arising because of self-selection into different levels of education. Our structural econometric model allows addressing for this issue and provides consistent estimates of returns to different levels of education under the assumption that individuals with higher propensity to education obtain higher levels of education.

Purpose of the article is to investigate the effect of marriage on male wages in Russia. The paper provides insight about contribution of observed and unobserved factors to wages of Russian men regarding their marital status.

Database is the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) for 2016. We add to the literature by introducing Generalized Oaxaca–Blinder Decomposition of the difference in mean wages of married and unmarried men. This generalization is free of conditional mean independence assumption.

We reveal negative observed price effect and substantial positive effect of changes in unobserved characteristics of married and unmarried men in Russia.

To our knowledge, our study is the first one that gives estimation of the volume and structure of the male marriage wage premium in Russia. The proposed approach is applicable for estimating labor market premiums and penalties for various individual characteristics.