EUROPEAN COMPARISON OF INTERGENERATIONAL DIFFERENCES IN PRIVATE RETURNS TOEDUCATION IN THE CONTEXT OF TERTIARY EDUCATION EXPANSION

This paper provides an international comparison of private returns to education which is put into the context of recent increase in tertiary education accessibility. We compare post-socialistic Central European countries: Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia to countries of continental Western Europe: Austria, Belgium, Germany, France and Luxembourg. Micro-data from the European Survey on Income and Living Conditions are utilised in order to estimate private returns to education using Mincerian earning regressions. We have found out that while in West European countries the returns to tertiary education acquired after 1995 are higher than returns to tertiary education acquired before 1995, which is in line with expectations based on obsolescence of education, this is not true for the post-socialistic countries. The Central European, post-socialistic countries provide evidence on decline in private returns to education acquired after 1995. This could be related with the character of tertiary education expansion, which was more intensive in post-socialistic countries and rather continuous in the countries of continental Western Europe.