Abstract
According to the 1978~2003 year manpower utilization survey, the educational wage gap in Taiwan has maintained at a fixed disparity before 1990. However, this gap has gradually expanded from 1990 to 2000 and then slows down afterwards. But it started to expand again beginning from 2003. The purpose of this thesis is to empirically investigate the education wage gap between industry and within industry in order to shed some light of this ever-changing phenomenon. The empirical framework of this thesis is based on the theoretical model of hu-man capital earning function by Mincer (1958). The measurement method of wage gap is derived from Fields and Wolff (1995) and Horrace and Oaxaca (2001). Our empirical results show that, after controlling the effects of all the explanatory vari-ables for individual and firm characteristics, the educational wage gap in Taiwan dur-ing the period of 1978~2003 indicates that lower-educated employee has been re-wared wage premium in the labor market. This results suggests that there may exists overeducation or the education and the occupation mismatch phenomenon in Taiwan over that past 25 years. In addition, our empirical results imply that the educational wage gap is higher for the construction industry and smaller for the social and indi-vidual service industry.