Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/62513 
Year of Publication: 
2012
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 6726
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Finding an instrument that is orthogonal to the disturbance term in the wage equation has been a topic of great deal of debate. Recently, Chesson et al. (2006) proposed that higher discount rates are significantly associated with a range of sexual behaviours, including having sex before age of 16 years. Following their paper, we use unprotected sexual behaviour and earlier age of sexual intercourse as alternative instrumental variables to account for endogeneity in schooling. The Bound et al. (1995) F-test indicates that our instruments are strongly correlated with schooling. We fail to reject the test of over-identifying restrictions, which demonstrates that the proposed instruments are valid and not correlated with the current earnings. In line with previous studies, our results suggest that the IV estimates of the returns to schooling are higher than the OLS estimates. In addition to the conditional mean, the proposed instruments are applied over the wage distribution using Chernozhukov and Hansen (2008) instrumental variable quantile approach.
Subjects: 
return to education
risky sexual behaviour
instrumental variables
JEL: 
I20
I22
J30
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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