1985-1989 3.56 3.54 3.59 3.68 Notes: Authors’ calculations using quarterly Labor Force Surveys from 2000 to 2015. Earnings are in constant Mexican Pesos 2014:1. Earnings refer to full-time workers (at least 30 weekly hours of work) with a valid wage. Includes workers with college education: salaried, self-employment and owners. Earnings below and above the 1 and 99 percentile (within gender and education group) are dropped. Sample restricted to male workers between 23-65 years old.

Table 3 shows the results for male earnings with college education (the Appendix includes the calculation for women). There are several important aspects to highlight. First, the oldest cohort (1950-1954) shows declines in wages since the beginning of the period. The earnings of that cohort have declined close to 40 percent. This is the largest decline in earnings for any cohort. Second, the cohorts 1955-1959, 1960-1964, and 1965-1969 show stagnant earnings between 2000 and 2008; nevertheless, their earnings all decline after the macroeconomic crisis. This decline is largest for the oldest cohort in this group, 1955-1959. Third, mid-age cohorts, 19701974 and 1975-1979, show the largest gains in earnings between the period 2000 and 2008. Their earnings increase between 11 and 22 percent. However, after the macroeconomic crisis, their earnings fall, arriving at the same level as in 2000-2002. Fourth, the younger cohorts, 1980-1984 and 1985-1989 do not show a decline in earnings even after the macroeconomic crisis. However the gains of this cohort are modest, 5 and 2 percent between the first and final year observed. These gains are substantially lower than for older cohorts.

Is there evidence that workers of newer cohorts are receiving a lower wage when they enter the workforce? This phenomenon could be interpreted as evidence consistent with the hypothesis that new entrants are, on average, of increasingly lower quality than new entrants in the preceding cohorts. As Table 3 shows, there is no evidence that this is occurring in the Mexican labor market. In fact, the younger cohorts are the only ones that show an increase in their earnings over time.

However, ideally we would like to compare earnings at the same age across cohorts when they enter the labor force. This is not possible given that the length of the panel is short, and the largest expansion in college enrollment was in the late 1990s. Ideally, we need to compare the cohorts in the early 2000s with the cohorts in the early 1990s. Nevertheless, we can compare wages for three cohorts when they were 23-25 years old. The cohort 1975-1979 had 23 years old (on average) in 2000, the same occurs for the cohort 1980-1984 in 2006 and the cohort 19851989 in 2010. The earnings of the cohorts 1975-1979 and 1980-1984 are approximately the same when they both enter the labor force. But the cohort 1985-1989 shows substantially lower earnings at the time of entry into the labor market (close to 20 percent). It is difficult to disentangle the effect of lower college quality due to the macroeconomic crisis in 2008.

In order to explore these issues more deeply, we regress the log of the average wage of collegeeducated workers against age and cohort variables. Estimating the contribution of experience (controlling for education), education (controlling for age) and the interaction of education and experience), suggests the opposite: i.e., the wage of new entrants has been increasing with each cohort. Table 4 shows the results of that regression. The cohort coefficients imply that there is 9