Does Education Pay In South Africa? Estimating Returns To Education Using Two Stage Least Squares Approach

This paper investigates, using the first three waves of the National Income Dynamic dataset, the link between education and wages. Specifically it estimates the potential impact of the educational levels on wages in South Africa over the period 2008 – 2012. A two-stage least squares (2SLS) method is applied to account for endogeneity bias. More specifically, we use a lagged education as an instrumental variable in a two-stage least squares framework. Our results show that the proposed instruments is relevant and that there is an unambiguously positive effect on the wages of an individual from participation in education.