The response of human capital accumulation to changes in the anticipated returns to schooling determines the type of skills supplied to the labor market, the productivity of future cohorts, and the evolution of inequality. Unlike the USA, the UK or Germany, Spain has experienced between 1995 and 2008 a drop in the returns to medium and tertiary education and, with a lag, a drop in schooling attainment of recent cohorts, providing the setup to estimate the response of different forms of human capital acquisition to relative increases in low-skill wages. We measure the expected returns to schooling using skill-specific wages bargained in collective agreements at the province–industry level. We argue that those wages are easily observable by youths and relatively insensitive to shifts in the supply of workers. Our preferred estimates suggest that a 10% increase in the ratio of wages of unskilled workers to the wages of mid-skill workers increases the fraction of males completing at most compulsory schooling by between 2 and 6.5 percentage points. The response is driven by males from less educated parents and comes at the expense of students from the academic high school track—rather than the vocational training track.

中文翻译：

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学校对低技能工资持续增长的反应：西班牙1989-2009年的证据

人力资本积累对预期学费回报变化的反应决定了提供给劳动力市场的技能类型，未来人群的生产率以及不平等的演变。与美国，英国或德国不同，西班牙在1995年至2008年期间经历了中等和高等教育的收益下降，并且随着时间的推移，最近一批人的受教育程度下降，从而提供了估算不同群体反应的设置人力资本获取的形式，以相对低技能工资的相对增加。我们使用在省/行业一级集体协议中议定的技能特定工资来衡量入学的预期回报。我们认为，这些工资很容易被年轻人观察到，并且对工人供应的变化相对不敏感。我们的首选估计表明，非技术工人的工资与中技术工人的工资之比增加10％，可使大多数义务教育阶段的男性完成率提高2至6.5个百分点。应对措施是由父母，受教育程度较低的男性推动的，而这是以牺牲高中学历而不是职业培训学历的学生为代价的。