family as an exclusion restriction frequently invoked in the female labor force participation decision. This is like the studies by Martins (2001), Chang (2011) and Huber and Mellace (2014). This variable potentially impacts the caregiving activities of women but does not affect earnings. Several previous studies also find higher selectivity corrected estimates than the OLS estimates for Turkey (see, for example, Tansel 1994, 2001, 2005, 2010).

Second, returns to education for females are larger than those to males. This is also found in the previous studies for Turkey cited above. In their global survey, Psacharopoulos and Patrinos (2018) also report higher returns for females than for males as a general pattern for many countries. Dougherty (2005) investigates the reasons for this finding and attributes this general observation to discrimination, tastes and circumstances.

Third, returns to education in the public sector are higher than that in the private sector. This is contrary to what is observed for many countries of the world by Psacharopoulos and Patrinos (2018). We can get some idea about the situation in the public versus private sectors although a comparison of the mean wages in these two sectors is not the same as the comparison of the returns to education in these two sectors. The mean wages in the public sector is larger than the mean wages in the private sector in the HLFS data in 2017 and in several years before. This observation is also confirmed with the recent Survey of Income and Living Conditions (SILC). Casual observation also supports this fact. Most people in the private sector work at the minimum wage while public sector salaries are much higher than the minimum wage. There are two points to note here. One is that the presence of larger numbers of Syrian refugees since 2011 has lowered the private sector wages substantially. Second is that there is a large informal sector in Turkey. Almost 30-35 percent of the wage earners are in the informal sector. It is well-known that the wages in the informal private sector are much lower than in the formal private sector (Tansel, 2000; Tansel and Kan 2016).

The fourth observation to note in Table 2 relates to the returns to education by the curriculum of the secondary school. We find that the return to the vocational secondary school is much higher than to the general secondary school. This is consistent with the previous studies on Turkey (Tansel 1994, 1989; Tansel and Bodur 2012). (This is confirmed with an extended Mincerian earnings function, which estimates private returns to secondary education by curriculum type, over primary education, at 5.7 percent for general secondary and 6.5 percent for vocational secondary (see Annex Table A-5.)) However, it is contrary to the general pattern observed in the most countries of the world, as discussed by Psacharopoulos and Patrinos (2018).

We now compare the estimates for 2017 in Table 2 with those in Annex Table A-1 which provides the estimation results from several previous studies in Turkey. The estimates in the two tables are not directly comparable because they pertain to different years. Further, the methodologies employed may also differ. In this section we concentrate on the estimates using the Mincerian earnings function approach. Tansel (1994) is the first study to estimate returns to education in Turkey using the Mincerian method. We note common findings in Tansel (1994), Tansel (2001), Tansel (2005) and Tansel and Bodur (2012). Looking at the results for men, we observe that the return to primary school is rather very low in all three studies. This is because the five-year primary schooling was the compulsory schooling during those years and it was almost universal. Another common observation in these studies is that the return to vocational schooling is higher than to 6