Fields of Study, Acquired Skills and the Wage Benefit from a Matching Job

This paper analyses the effects of individual investments in four field-specific educational resources on wages in The Netherlands. Based on a surrcy on the Dutch population. scales are developed that measure the amount of cultural, economic, communicative and technical resources that fields of study supply to students. It was hypothesized. first, that having invested in any of these four types of resources should enhance entry possibilities into jobs that rcquire related skills and knowledge. Secondly, economic resources are expected to affect wages positively. Thirdly, people whose educational resources match the type of job held are presumed to have a wage benefit from this match. Empirical analyses on two Dutch datasets ( 1 1 = 6,373) generally support the hypotheses. in that matches increased wages in three out of four branches: economic. communicative and technical types of jobs. People who invested in cultural ficld-specific resources did not have a wage benefit in corresponding types of work. which may be explained by the generic character of the skills obtained. 1. Introductioii The socially unequal distribution of income has long been in the spotlight of sociological and economic research. In particular, the role of education in predicting income attainment has received a lot of attention. Hoivever. the focus has been rather one-sided, focusing on educa-tional level. hlost research thus neglects other educational characteristics that are particularly informative on income attainment in modern \Vestern societies. One such largely neglected feature is the type of educational specialization, orfield ofsttitl~ ~ that people have chosen (but se