Do more educated people work for the government?

ABSTRACT

We investigate the effect of education on public job choice using quarter of birth as an instrumental variable. We find that an additional year of education increases the probability of public sector employment by 1.87 percentage points. However, this positive effect is driven by females, whites, and those with high school degrees or less. For those with college or higher degrees, we observe a decrease in public employment with more education. Our results imply that highly-educated individuals go into high-risk, high-return occupations.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• job choice
• public sector
• private sector
• instrumental variable

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ The results are robust to using other age groups such as 24 to 54.

² If public sector jobs had a higher portion of such specialized occupations, our estimates would be biased upwards.

³ We drop professional speciality occupations such as teachers, lawyers, engineers and physicians. For a more detailed list of occupation, refer to IPUMS 1990 Occupation classification system.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Yonsei University [Signature Research Cluster Program / 2021-22-0011].