Internal rates of return to female higher education in Japan

The purpose of this paper is to compute internal rates of return to female university and junior college education in Japan over the past few decades. The main difficulty that arises when achieving this purpose comes from insufficiency of data for the rates of female labor force participation classified by educational careers. This paper computes internal rates of return for the past few decades using limited available data and also making several alternative assumptions. The computation results show that internal rates of return to female university and junior college education tend to be higher than (or at least close to) those to male university education.