Xiaodong Gong and Robert Tanton, (2018), Returns to education in Australia 2006-2016

In January 2014, the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis (IGPA) at the University of Canberra was established to harness the research strengths of NATSEM and the ANZSOG Institute for Governance (ANZSIG). [...] The raw differences of earnings and wages across educational levels are very clear, with those of the individuals with higher education much higher than the rest and those of the ones who did not finish Year 12 the lowest. [...] Three stars means the variable has a statistically significant relationship with wages or earnings in our model at the 1% level (so we are 99% confident of the relationship); two stars means the relationship is significant at the 5% level (so we are 95% confident of the relationship); and one star means the relationship is significant at the 10% level (so we are 90% confident of the relationship). [...] We conducted simple t-tests for the estimates of the returns to education being the same across the years (ignoring the correlations between them which results from the fact that they are obtained from the same longitudinal sample), and the results show that they are not significantly different.1 1 The t test assumes independent samples. [...] The best we can do with the data we have is a t test, violating the assumption of independence of the samples.