Abstract

The following thesis consists of three essays, each one being a study of issues of accumulation of and returns to human capital using real-world individual-level data. The first study examines what underlies differences in educational attainment between the children of immigrants to Canada and the children of the Canadian-born parents. It concludes that the children of immigrants have done better in terms of schooling, and that individual and family variables as well as unobserved characteristics such as ability cannot fully account for this difference.
The second study utilizes unique Canadian surveys to investigate the effects of overeducation on wages of post-secondary graduates. It confirms that jobs requiring a post-secondary degree pay substantially higher wages than jobs that do not require education beyond high-school, and also finds a large variation both in returns to required education as well as in overeducation premia across genders, degrees and fields of study.
The last essay proposes and estimates a structural dynamic model of optimal schooling and wages to explain differences between American whites and ethnic minorities of Afro-Americans and Hispanics. The study finds, among other things, that differences in educational attainment between the three ethnics can largely be explained by differences in individual endowments, while behavioural differences seem to be more important in explaining wage differences.