| Content | This paper explore a signaling model to investigate the impact the education expansion on workers’ wage and the cost of education. We propose a signal model with a continuous distribution of workers’ ability based on the work of Ge and Haller (2018). By implementing laboratory experiments, it gives consistent outcomes with the model’s expectation. The main findings are: 1) the enrollment expansion helps to alleviate workers’ competition for education opportunity and can decrease the overall education cost; 2) the policy may lower firms’ expectations for both educated and uneducated workers and drive the wage for both groups down in the labor market. Besides, the theoretical model also implies that the education expansion has ambiguous effect on the wage premium of education, and it depends on the feature of industry. |
