| Abstract: |
1970s witnessed violent, widespread, and highly-politicized student protests
in Turkey. Small protests turned into bloody street clashes, the death toll
exceeded 5,000, and a military coup came in - which resulted in mass arrests.
Universities were at the center of the conflict and violence. We present a
comprehensive empirical analysis of the education and labor market
consequences of this political turmoil on cohorts directly exposed to
educational disruptions. First, we document that the number of new admissions
and graduates in post-secondary education declined significantly due to the
turmoil. We report the decline in post-secondary graduation ratio to be around
6.6-7 percentage points for the exposed individuals. Second, we estimate a
counterfactual wage distribution for the exposed cohorts using semi-parametric
methods and check whether the turmoil affected the wage and occupation
distributions. We find that the decline in educational attainment due to the
turmoil pushed the exposed population toward medium- and low-income
occupations, and compressed their wages toward the minimum wage. Finally, we
use the unexpected decline in educational attainment as an IV to estimate
returns to schooling. Our IV estimates suggest that the returns to an
additional year of schooling range between 11.6-14 percent for men. In a
heterogeneous-outcome framework, these IV estimates can be interpreted as the
average causal effect of an additional year of schooling in post-secondary
education. |