Back to School: Labor-Market Returns to Higher Vocational Schooling

This paper estimates the labor-market returns for workers to a new form of postsecondary vocational education, vocational master’s degrees. We use matching methods on comprehensive Finnish registry data to identify a sample... [ view full abstract ]

This paper estimates the labor-market returns for workers to a new form of postsecondary vocational education, vocational master’s degrees. We use matching methods on comprehensive Finnish registry data to identify a sample of individuals who did not attend these programs but have similar demographic and labor-market characteristics. We use individual fixed effects models on the matched sample to capture any time-invariant differences across individuals. Attendance in vocational master’s programs leads to higher earnings of eight percent five years after entry. Earnings gains are similar by gender and age, but they are marginally higher for health than for business or technology and trades