We know that tens of millions of people are currently out of work in the United States. More than 26 million workers filed for unemployment benefits between mid-March and mid-April alone. The most popular measure of the strength of the labor market is the unemployment rate. Forecasts for how much it will rise in the … Continue reading
Vocational education and training (VET) are highly valued by many. For instance, VET is expected to play an important role in achieving two Europe 2020 headline targets set in the education field: (a) reduce the rate of early school leavers from education to <10%; (b) increase the share of 30–40 years old having completed tertiary … Continue reading
We provide an overview of the integration of refugees into the labor markets of a number of high-income countries. Discussing the ways in which refugees and economic migrants are differently selected and so might be expected to perform differently in a host country’s labor market, we examine employment and wages for these groups over time … Continue reading
We pool expanded international data from the PIAAC survey of adult skills across Canadian provinces and other participating countries to replicate the IALS-based analysis by Coulombe, Tremblay and Marchand (2004) as well as Coulombe and Tremblay (2006) based on more recent and more comprehensive data on the literacy skills of the adult population. Our results … Continue reading
Human capital is today an important determinant of economic growth. However, evidence on its long-run regional development in Europe is still relatively limited. For this reason, this paper investigates the development of human capital in the European regions over the last 200 years. It indicates that “the long shadow of history” plays an important role … Continue reading
A large body of research conducted in various countries has highlighted discrimination for its role in depressing immigrants’ effective integration into the labour market (e.g. Carlsson, 2010; Drydakis and Vlassis, 2010; Fibbi et al., 2006; Heath and Cheung, 2007; Kaas and Manger, 2011; McGinnity and Lunn, 2011; Midtbøen, 2015; Weichselbaumer, 2015). Immigrants’ disadvantaged status has … Continue reading
This report presents findings from a comparative mixed methods study of employer engagement in active labour market programmes (ALMPs) in the UK and Denmark. The report focuses on findings from 103 in-depth semi-structured qualitative interviews with employers and organisations delivering (ALMPs) (‘providers’) 3 in the UK 4 and Denmark. Employers in both countries were … Continue reading
Recent improvements in robotics have rekindled ancient fears about the impact of robotics on humankind. Unfortunately, existing data seldom distinguishes robots from other types of automation, so research into their impact so far has been difficult. This article introduces research from a new Statistics Canada dataset, Robots!, on the impact of robots at the firm-level. … Continue reading
Canada offers refugee protection to individuals who have a well-founded fear of persecution or face other personal dangers in their home country. Although refugee claimants seek asylum in Canada for humanitarian reasons, their labour market outcomes play a crucial role in successful integration. A new Statistics Canada study, conducted in collaboration with Immigration, Refugees, and … Continue reading
Many fear that rapid technical change is raising the rate at which workers are displaced from their jobs, as machines take over many tasks once performed by humans (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014). By shifting the locus of production of many goods from advanced economies to emerging and developing ones, globalization also has contributed to worker … Continue reading
Using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), the ofcial source of labor market statistics in the United States, and implementing a regression approach in order to isolate the impact of the pandemic from seasonal and annual patterns, we fnd that weekly labor earnings per adult fell by nearly $100 between February and April, with … Continue reading
In this analysis, we find evidence of structural damage in the monthly employment data. Early in the pandemic, most workers who lost jobs were laid off temporarily, as businesses expected to reopen and recall their workers. However, as time has passed, an increasing share of unemployed workers have no expectation of being recalled: the fraction … Continue reading
The COVID-19 pandemic led to an abrupt shift from in-person to virtual instruction in Spring 2020. Using a difference-in-differences framework that leverages within-course variation on whether students started their Spring 2020 courses in person or online, we estimate the impact of this shift on the academic performance of Virginia’s community college students. We find that … Continue reading
This study uses longitudinal data combining information from the Postsecondary Student Information System (PSIS) with data from personal income tax (T1 Family File) to analyze the impact of short-duration credentials (certificates and diplomas from colleges and universities), completed after an undergraduate degree, on the outcomes on the labour market of graduates from Canadian public universities. … Continue reading
The Covid-19 pandemic outbreak and the ensuing economic uncertainty caused interruptions to apprenticeship training. This is putting the future of apprenticeships at risk just at the time when they will be most needed to protect employment and sustain the recovery. Apprenticeships offer a mix of training on the job and additional off-the-job training. This is … Continue reading