Education is a key determinant of earnings, as several South African studies have
confirmed. Years of schooling completed, however, provides an imperfect approximation of
the effective level of education achieved, mainly due to variations in the quality of education
received. This study addresses this issue by, for the first time in South Africa, incorporating
quality of education in the modelling of earnings. Differences in quality of education are
viewed as a form of pre-labour market discrimination. By decomposing the wage gap before …

Earnings functions, labour market discrimination and quality of education in South Africa …