Cognitive skills or diplomas – what matters more for wages in Poland?

A vast – and constantly growing – literature provides evidence on the importance of formal education and cognitive skills on individual wages in contemporary, knowledge-based economies and societies. The OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) provides measures of literacy and numeracy that have been used in numerous analyses. The Polish follow-up study of PIAAC (postPIAAC) includes a measure of another factor of cognitive skills, namely, processing speed. In this paper, we apply the Mincerian wage regression to assess the returns to formal education, numeracy, processing speed, and several control variables using the Polish PIAAC and postPIAAC data. The results confirm the findings from other analyses that formal education matters more than cognitive skills for wages in Poland.