Skill Premiums Changes under Business Cycle:Examining the Effect of Higher Education Expansion

• Main Authors: Chieh-Jen Chen, 陳玠仁
• Other Authors: 林彥伶
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/pd6n9w

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 經濟學系經濟與財務碩士班 === 106 === The human capital theory shows that individuals can get higher rewards through the promotion of education. However, under the policy of higher education expansion in Taiwan, wages seem to be declined and regressed. This study considered the policy of higher education expansion would be resulted in the divergence in salary, but it is not easy to be observed from the average salary, particularly for the skill premiums between higher and lower education workers. In literature, there were fewer about the topics of skill premium and the human capital investment under business cycle, and their results are also diverged. In addition, the related literature only analyzed the impact of boom and bust on human capital investment or wages in the labor market. In this study, we would like to discuss the impact of prosperity and recession on the skill premium and consider the impact of higher education expansion on the skill premium under business cycle. We adopted the manpower utilization survey data and Taiwan business cycles information. A difference–in–difference model was used for empirical analysis of long-term data. Our empirical results showed that the impact of the business cycles on the skill premium were not significant for both men and women. Additionally, by using a difference–in–difference–in–difference model, the education expansion policy has been found insignificant for the male wages but significant for the female wages, which means there is a symmetric skill premium variations for men and asymmetric skill premium variations for women, under business cycle.