We document and analyse the wage gap between vocational and general secondary education in Portugal between 1994 and 2013. As Portuguese workers have been educated in different school systems, we have to distinguish between birth cohorts. Analysing the wage gaps within cohorts, we find no support for either the human capital prediction of crossing wage profiles or the hypothesis that general graduates increasingly outperform vocational graduates in late career. We discover that the lifecycle wage profiles have shifted over time. We link the pattern of shifting cohort profiles to changes in the school system and in the structure of labour demand. We conclude that assessing the relative value of vocational education requires assessing how the vocational curriculum responds to changes in economic structure and technology. We show that the decline in assortative matching between workers and firms has benefited vocationally educated workers.

我们记录并分析了 1994 年至 2013 年葡萄牙职业教育和普通中等教育之间的工资差距。由于葡萄牙工人在不同的学校系统中接受教育，我们必须区分出生队列。分析队列中的工资差距，我们发现交叉工资分布的人力资本预测或一般毕业生在职业生涯后期的表现越来越优于职业毕业生的假设都没有支持。我们发现生命周期工资概况随着时间的推移而发生了变化。我们将队列变化的模式与学校系统和劳动力需求结构的变化联系起来。我们的结论是，评估职业教育的相对价值需要评估职业课程如何应对经济结构和技术的变化。