Falling Educational Wage Premia in Italy - In this paper we analyze the evolution of Educational wage premia (Ewp) in the Italian private sector. Drawing upon the Household income and wealth survey (Bank of Italy) we show that Ewp showed a general decrease between 1993 and 2004, at all quantiles of the wage distribution. Our findings do not depend on the type of educational attainments. A number of robustness checks and various econometric specifications are also applied in order to address matters of sample selection. Thus Italy is situated as an outlier among the Oecd countries, where the Ewp have generally increased over the last few decades.
Keywords: Educational wage premia, Quantile regression, Italy