Evaluation of the impact of Erasmus study mobility on salaries and employment of recent graduates in Spain

ABSTRACT

Little empirical literature assessing the impact of Erasmus study program on graduate career prospects exists. All too often, the empirical evidence available is either bias or indirect. Furthermore, the existing differences among study mobility participants and non-participant peers in terms of ability, socioeconomic background or field of study are often ignored, leading us to believe that the correlations observed to date cannot be considered as causal. In an attempt to obtain less biased evidence on the effect of Erasmus study mobility on career and salary prospects, a propensity score matching approach was used. As far as we are aware, no other studies involving this approach have been carried out in Spain. Our objective therefore was to contribute to the knowledge available through the analysis of two graduate surveys. The main conclusion reached was that in the medium term, Erasmus programs do in effect have a positive impact on the prospects of recent graduates, who in terms of income were able to command salaries that were 10–12 per cent higher than their counterparts.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobility
• Erasmus
• graduates
• salaries
• employment
• propensity score matching

Acknowledgements

I have benefited from comments from three anonymous referees. Furthermore I would like to thank Professor Elena Huergo for her help in using the propensity score matching technique. Any remaining errors are mine alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Detailed information on EILU methodology can be found in INE (2016).

2 The procedure is performed in Stata 13.

3 In the case of dichotomous variables, the interpretation of the coefficient is as follows: exp(β)=W_Erasmus/W_noErasmus.

4 Under the category of Nordic Countries the following are listed in the survey: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.

5 Under the category of “Rest of Europe”, other European countries not belonging to the European Union, such as Switzerland, are included.

Additional information

Funding

This work has benefited from a grant for financing of research projects of Santander-Universidad Complutense de Madrid (PR 26/16 – 20327).