Research Fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, Nankang, Taipei, Taiwan 11529.
Soc Sci Res. 2011 May;40(3):796-810. doi: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2010.12.008.
The causal impact of higher education on earnings may be heterogeneous across different members of a population. Using a newly developed instrumental-variable method in economics, we illustrate heterogeneous treatment effects of higher education on earnings resulting from sorting mechanisms that select individuals with certain unobserved attributes into college education. The setting of our empirical work is contemporary Taiwan -- a transitional economy that has recently experienced a rapid expansion in higher education. We find distinct patterns by gender, with selection bias most clearly shown among women but not among men: the college return to earnings is on average greater for women who actually attended college than women who did not attend college.
高等教育对收入的因果影响可能在人群中的不同成员之间存在差异。本文使用经济学中一种新开发的工具变量方法，说明了由于某些不可观测的属性将个体筛选到大学教育中而导致的高等教育对收入的异质处理效应。我们实证工作的背景是当代台湾——一个最近经历了高等教育快速扩张的转型经济体。我们发现性别之间存在明显的模式，女性中存在明显的选择偏差，但男性中则不存在：平均而言，实际上过大学的女性比没有上过大学的女性的大学回报率更高。
