Count your hours: returns to education in Poland

Combining information from two Polish surveys from 2005 and taking advantage of the Polish microsimulation model (SIMPL) we demonstrate how different the estimates of returns to education can be depending on whether we use net or gross, and monthly or hourly wages, and we examine the role of correcting for employment selection. Annual rates of return to university education for men vary from 6.7% to 9.7% and for women from 8.0% to 13.4%. We show that simple linear estimation performs relatively well for men, while family demographics seem to be the “second best” exclusion restriction in the case of the estimation for women.