Are there educational externalities within marriage in urban Argentina?

SANTOS, MARÍA EMMA

Houston

Conferencia; 33rd Annual Meeting of the Academy of Economics and Finance (AEF); 2006

Academy of Economics and Finance

In this paper we ask the question whether a spouse’s years of education have a positive impact over his/her partner’s earnings in urban Argentina. In tune with previous evidence, we find that each additional year of education of a married person increases the spouse’s hourly earnings in about 3%. This would support the idea that there are positive educational externalities occurring within marriages. However, when we control for positive assortative mating using the predicted hazard rate for the spouse’s years of education as an instrumental variable, we find that the spouse’s education is no longer a significant determinant of earnings.