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The Economic Returns to Higher Education

What are the economic returns to higher education? Simon C. Jäger provides new evidence on this question using the openings of new universities in Germany coupled with administrative data on earnings. The results of his study document the economic returns to an expansion of the higher education system and suggest that university education has high labour market returns, even in an environment featuring a high-quality apprenticeship training system.

Mr Jaeger's research interests include labour, public, applied and behavioural economics. He is co-founder and coordinator of the Harvard University German Federal Employment Agency Research Data Center, a Research Affiliate of the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) as well as an IZA Research Affiliate.

Simon Jäger is a postdoctoral researcher at the Behavior and Inequality Research Institute (BRIQ) in Bonn. In Summer 2017, he will join the Economics Department at MIT as an Assistant Professor. Mr Jäger was recently awarded a PhD in Economics from Harvard University for a thesis entitled, "Essays in Labor and Public Economics". He has a BSc and MSc in Economics from the University of Bonn and has also studied at the University of California at Berkeley.