Three Essays on Returns to Education, Health and the Spatial Wage Curve in Turke

This dissertation comprises three papers on wage and health returns to education and spatial wage curve in Turkey. The second and third chapters make use of the exogenous variations generated by the 1997 Eight-Year Compulsory Schooling Law and the accompanying middle- school class openings to estimate economic and health returns to education. The findings suggest that the reform and the intensity of the reform substantially increased the educational attainment. The second chapter investigates the wage returns to education. Results show that one additional year of schooling increases individual wages by around 9 percent. The third chapter examines the causal impact of education on health outcomes and health behavior. The estimates indicate that there is no statistically significant effect of education on health outcomes. The final chapter focuses on the spatial wage curve in Turkey. Results show that individual real wages are more responsive to the adjacent regions' unemployment rates than the local unemployment rates. Further investigation reveals that the wage curve estimates are sensitive to the use of group-specific regional unemployment rates.