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Abstract
Human capital development, especially higher educational attainment attaches high
premium to human skills as an important factor of production. In view of this, the
objective of the study is defined in two folds; first, to revisit returns to education in
Nigeria and second, to investigate effects of education on the economic welfare of
households in Nigeria. The study uses Double Hurdle (DH) model and Quantile
Regression (QR), respectively for the objective one and two. Thus, our findings show
that returns to schooling (i.e., labour market earnings) at primary, secondary and
postgraduate levels are very low relative to schooling at the tertiary education in
Nigeria. Also, we find the effects of primary, secondary and postgraduate education on
household economic welfare to be substantially lower compared with that of tertiary
education in the country. The implication of these findings is that investment up to
completing tertiary education is vital for higher welfare through increasing labour
market earnings among households in Nigeria.