Valor de la información en educación superior y efecto de la calidad universitaria en remuneraciones en el Perú

Literature in behavioural economics shows that information has a key important role in decision making. The main objective of this paper is to estimate the value of information in post-secondary education market. The Peruvian case offers a unique natural experiment setting: in 1996 Peruvian government relaxed legal requirements to créate educational institutions. Institutions created after 1996 are of lower quality, on average. In 2015 the Peruvian government launched “Portal en Carrera”, a public information web page which contains data on salaries in the formal sector of recent university and non-university graduates. We found that only 62 percent of university-careers show positive economic returns and just 4 percent of non-university-careers show positive economic returns. The effect on wages of attending a high quality institutions is 17.3 percentage points. This effect represents 40 percent of the gap between an individual who attended a high quality institution and an individual who attended a low quality institution. Finally, if just 1 percent of recent graduates had had information on salaries before making post-secondary decisions and had decided not to continue studying and had started working, they would have earned 4.5 million of soles during their working life.