Abstract:

Investigating return from schooling, scholars have traditionally focused on the supply side, collecting data from employees. This research focuses on the demand side and describes how employers create a system of signals, talking about which requirements are essential for potential candidates. These signals are primarily in the form of salary amounts. Using open data about vacancies of a popular government platform – enbek.kz – that covering low and medium-paid jobs in the public and quasi-public sectors, small and medium-sized businesses, we analyze 75 thousand vacancies. There are two groups of vacancies posted on Enbek.kz: state-subsidized and unsubsidized. Unsubsidized vacancies are offers from small and medium-sized businesses that seek to maximize profits. State-subsidized vacancies serve different purposes and are often related to the desire of officials to report about the maximum number of jobs. Centering our attention on these differences this research becomes more comprehensive and better demonstrates the effects for potential applicants. We conduct a comparative analysis of the two types, regressing the potential level of wages on the level of education, language proficiency, skills, and other factors. In addition, we separately use quantile regression to estimate how different the effect of an additional year of work is for the lowest- and highest-paying jobs. Thus, this study contributes to the human capital research program by shedding light on how signals from employers influence returns to education.