Browsing by Author "Estrellado, Anna Margarita"

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    Education as a signal: some evidence on the Philipine labor market
    (2006-04) Estrellado, Anna Margarita; Evangelista. Maria Victoria
    This study revisits the human capital-signaling debate in ::he context of the Philippine labor market. Previous researches have used these frameworks to give alternative explanations of the relationship between education and productivity. Stated succinctly, the human capital framework directly links education to actual productivity, while the signaling framework relates education to perceived productivity. The signaling framework contends that there is no definite measure for actual productivity. As a result, employers use signals; such as education, thc.t they believe to be correlated with productivity, as bases for rating prospective applicants' ability to perform the job description. In this paper, we analyze data to test the relevance of the signaling framework to the Philippine labor market. To this end, we ·evaluate the minimum educational requirements for jobs in the Philippines. This necessitates a comparison between job requirements ten to thirty years ago and those of the same jobs today. Our findings indicate that the productive capabilities signaled by a worker completing a level of education many years ago are not the same as what a worker with the same educational attainment signals now. This suggests the relevance of the signaling framework in the Philippine context.