| dc.description.abstract | This thesis aims to analyze whether and to what extent the graduate education affects personal wage relative to who receive the Belcher degree in Taiwan. Moreover, how the quantity and quality of graduate education influence the wage premium of a worker who has finished the graduate education is also investigated in this study. Utilizing the dataset of Manpower Utilization Quasi-Longitudinal Survey (MUQLS) to construct a quasi-panel data over the 1990-2004 period and employing the technique of double fixed effect model, the empirical results can be summarized as follow:
First, relatively to workers have received university degree, the labor of graduate degree really has received a higher pay, implying that there exist an educational premium for graduate education. The rate of returns to graduate education is about 2.5% ~ 10% during the observed period in this study. However, the rate of returns to graduate education is found to drop after 2000.
Second, after controlling for unobserved individual heterogeneity, there is a great difference for empirical results between fixed effect and OLS model, indicating that the unobserved individual heterogeneity has apparent influences to the wages. Therefore, the estimates for the return to education of wage structure may suffer an upward bias if the unobserved individual heterogeneity is not taken into account.
Third, the expansion policy for higher education increases substantially the supply of graduate students in labor market and then results in a negative impact on the wage of workers of graduate education. Moreover, the education quality measured by the entrance rate of graduate education is also found to have a negative impact on an individual’s wage premium as the education quality lowers. | en_US |