Age and schooling vintage effects on earnings profiles in Switzerland

This paper examines the impact on the experience-earnings profile of a worker's ageing and of the human capital depreciation due to the obsolescence of schooling in Switzerland. To disentangle the vintage effect from the age effect, we follow the methodological idea proposed by Neuman and Weiss (1995). The results show that vintage effects are relatively pronounced in Swiss manufacturing: there is greater depreciation in the return on experience for better educated workers in both low and high-tech industries, but this depreciation is significantly higher for high-tech workers.