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Non-Cognitive Skills – University education has significant effects study finds
Recently, a public debate has emerged on whether universities teach the right skill-sets that prepare students for a continuously changing and globally expanding labor market. Various articles from leading scholars and journalists emphasize that university education falls short of teaching students creativity, socioemotional skills, attributes of ownership, and the ability to learn on the fly. … Continue reading
Investment in training – Implementing a training contract reduced quitting by around 15%
Firms may hesitate to provide training which is general enough that it can be used in other jobs, if employees are likely to leave shortly after being trained. A “training contract,” which penalizes the employee for quitting quickly after being trained, may help solve this problem. Using data from a large US trucking company, we … Continue reading
Older Workers in EU – Integration strategy with job search training, hiring subsidies and health promotion are the most effective
Although the labour market situation of older workers has significantly improved over time, opportunities to work at older age still vary considerably across EU countries. To trace diverging developments and to assess what works best in retaining employment and bringing older unemployed back to work developments in five countries are analysed: Germany, France, the Netherlands, … Continue reading
Gender Wage Gap in Developed countries – Considerable heterogeneity and differences in wages remain quite large
Despite the increased attachment of women to the labour force in nearly all developed countries, a stubborn gender pay gap remains. This chapter provides a review of the economics literature on the gender wage gap, with an emphasis on developed countries. We begin with an overview of the trends in the gender differences in wages … Continue reading
Long-Term Unemployed – A signal of lower motivation leading to lower hiring chances
Recent evidence from large-scale field experiments has shown that employers use job candidates’ unemployment duration as a sorting criterion. In the present study, we investigate the mechanisms underlying this pattern. To this end, we conduct a lab experiment in which participants make hiring decisions concerning fictitious job candidates with diverging unemployment durations. In addition, these … Continue reading
Finland – Is the unemployment rate a good measure of labour market slack?
Observations that the official unemployment rate does not describe labour market slack sufficiently broadly have led to the development of broadened measures of unemployment. These types of measures are regularly used, at least in the United States and have also occasionally been explored by the ECB. Such measures seek to include, in addition to people … Continue reading
The Working Poor in US – The highest among seventeen affluent democratic nations (as of 2000)
In-work poverty became a prominent policy issue in the United States long before the term itself acquired any meaning and relevance in other industrialized countries. With America’s embrace of an employment-centered antipoverty strategy, the working poor have become even more of an issue. This paper reviews some key trends, drivers and policy issues. How much … Continue reading
Seattle’s Minimum Wage – The study from the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics (CWED) at UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment
This brief on Seattle’s minimum wage experience represents the first in a series that CWED will be issuing on the effects of the current wave of minimum wage policies–those that range from $12 to $15. Upcoming CWED reports will present similar studies of Chicago, Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose and New York City, among others. The … Continue reading
US – The average employment multiplier is 1.09 study finds
This paper estimates dynamic employment multipliers in a U.S. county during 1998-2015. On average,one exogenous tradable job gain creates 1.1 jobs in the rest of the county economy in the same year, but is offset by losses of 0.23 job one year later and 0.32 job two years later. The multiplier is modest during the … Continue reading
School-to-Work Transition in Italy – A sclerotic labor market and a very inefficient and disorganized educational system
This essay has examined the Italian SWTR, which is a typical example of the European Mediterranean one where the role of the State is marginal as compared to that of the family. The latter has to bear the cost of the extremely slow transition period young people undergo on their way from education to a … Continue reading
Overqualified Grads in US – 25 percent in 2015 based on a “good-fit jobs” approach
Recent studies have claimed that as many as 48 percent of college graduates are overqualified for the jobs they have, but this figure seems inconsistent with their comparatively higher earnings relative to earnings of workers without a college degree. To obtain that high mark, those studies classify many occupations that pay well as being a … Continue reading
Soft Skills – Policies aimed at reducing so-called “negative” non-cognitive or behavioral traits, however, could harm children in the long run
There is growing interest in how schools can shape children’s non-cognitive skills (sometimes known as behavioral traits, soft skills, or personality). One reason for this interest is that non-cognitive skills predict a wide range of economic outcomes, such as employment and lifetime earnings, but are also relatively malleable—at least until adulthood. This opens up a … Continue reading
Genetic score that predicts education is also associated with higher wages, but only among individuals with a college education
Economists generally accept that the skills rewarded in the labor market arise from a combination of endowed abilities, economic environments, and endogenous human capital in- vestments. Endowments, environments and investments almost certainly interact in compli- cated ways, transforming the distribution of abilities drawn at birth into a distribution of education, wages, and labor supply outcomes … Continue reading
Changes in the age structure of the workforce are significantly correlated with changes in aggregate productivity
This paper examines the relationship between workforce demographics and aggregate productivity. Changes in the age structure of the workforce is found to be significantly correlated with changes in aggregate productivity. Different demographic structures may be related to almost one quarter of the persistent productivity gap between the OECD and low income nations as well as … Continue reading
Gender Gap in Spain – Women still rank second in key areas of society related to employment
The goal of this study was to analyse the perceptions of Spanish women taking occupational training courses and of gender equality experts with respect to the relationship between initial formal education, occupational training, continuing education and employment, as well as the role played by the family in this relationship, in order to elucidate conceptions of … Continue reading
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