Do educational systems affect earnings? A comparative analysis across countries and gender

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of education on workers’ earnings and its role in creating inequality between and within educational levels. The comparative analysis involves the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy in the light of institutional variety in the design of schooling systems. A series of two-stage probit models with latent variable is tested and quantile regression (QR) is adopted in the second stage to estimate log-earnings equations by employment status. Country-specific patterns of QR returns to education along the conditional earnings distribution are argued