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Valuable experience: How internships affect university graduates’ income

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Abstract

This paper analyzes whether and how attending an internship during tertiary education affects income. We address endogeneity with an IV approach that exploits information regarding whether the internship was a mandatory component of the study. We further address selection into programs with mandatory internship by using the share of mandatory internships at the closest university, exploiting the low mobility of Swiss students. The results suggest that doing an internship increases income. In contrast to the literature on internships we find that the effect mainly works by increasing human capital rather than through signaling, and mainly works through general rather than firm- or field-specific human capital.

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  • Thomas Bolli & Katherine Caves & Maria Esther Oswald-Egg, 2019. "Valuable experience: How internships affect university graduates’ income," KOF Working papers 19-459, KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich.
  • Handle: RePEc:kof:wpskof:19-459
    DOI: 10.3929/ethz-b-000355960
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    Cited by:

    1. Maria Esther Oswald-Egg & Ursula Renold, 2019. "No Experience, No Employment: The Effect of Vocational Education and Training Work Experience on Labour Market Outcomes after Higher Education," KOF Working papers 19-469, KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich.
    2. Oswald-Egg, Maria Esther & Renold, Ursula, 2021. "No experience, no employment: The effect of vocational education and training work experience on labour market outcomes after higher education," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 80(C).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Internship; Income; Human capital; Signaling; Soft skills; Experience;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I23 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Higher Education; Research Institutions
    • J01 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - General - - - Labor Economics: General
    • J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials

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