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This paper looks at the effects of the 'great recession' on young people's labour market experiences in the European Union. The paper documents some of the key characteristics of young people's labour market experiences during the current recession and then seeks to provide some explanations of these applying both cross-section and time series rolling regression models in order, in particular, to better understand the role of labour market institutions as a determining factor of differing experiences across countries. The analysis finds that labour market flexibility contributed significantly to the negative consequences felt by young people during the recession.

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In an environment of accelerating technological change and increasing digitalization, firms need to adopt new technologies faster than ever before to stay competitive. This paper examines whether updates of education curricula help to bring new technologies faster into firms' workplaces. We study technology changes and curriculum updates from an early wave of digitalization (i.e., computer numerically controlled machinery, computer-aided design, and desktop publishing software). We take a text-as-data approach and tap into two novel data sources to measure change in educational content and the use of technology at the workplace: first, vocational education curricula and, second, firms' job advertisements. To examine the causal effects of adding new technology skills to curricula on the diffusion of these technologies in firms' workplaces (measured by job advertisements), we use an event study design. Our results show that curriculum updates substantially shorten the time it takes for new technologies to arrive in firms' workplaces, especially for mainstream firms.

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China's phenomenal growth is accompanied by both relatively low level of standards of living and high inequality. It is widely believe that investing in education could be an effective strategy to promote higher standards of living as well as to reduce inequality. However, little is known about whether this belief is empirically supported. To this end, we employ a recently developed distributional approach to estimate returns to education across the whole earnings distribution in urban China during economic transition. We find that returns to education are generally more pronounced for individuals in the lower tail of the earnings distribution than for those in the upper tail, in stark contrast to the results found in developed countries. Our result implies that education indeed reduces earnings inequality while increasing individuals' earnings. We also find that the returns to education are uniformly larger for women than for men across the distribution. The results suggest the presence of added effects of education on earnings, as opposed to productivity-enhancing effects, for disadvantaged groups. Finally, we find that rates of educational return increased over time for all parts of the earnings distribution.

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In this study, we describe the postsecondary transitions of students taking [career and technical education] CTE courses in high school using administrative data on one cohort of high school students from Washington State. Our findings indicate that CTE students are less likely to enroll in college overall, especially four-year college. But among students who do enroll in college, CTE students are significantly more likely to enroll in and complete vocational programs, especially in applied STEM and public safety fields. Among students not enrolled in college, CTE students also are more likely to obtain full-time employment - and to work more intensively - within the first three years following high school graduation. Thus, despite the reduction in four-year college enrollment, the higher completion rates of vocational credentials among CTE concentrators in college indicate some important positive outcomes for this population.

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The increasing use of online labour platforms as intermediaries for finding work - known as crowdwork or gig work - is a new form of 'hybrid' (solo)self-employment that hinges on the borders of dependent and self-employment. In this study we use a novel international dataset of online platform workers, the Cedefop Crowdlearn dataset, to analyse if engagement in hybrid digital self-employment could augment individuals' skills and hence potentially act as a stepping stone towards fuller entrepreneurship. We also examine if a digital proto-entrepreneurial experience is sustainable over time by analysing crowdworkers' satisfaction from their work. The paper's findings provide some support to the hypothesis that hybrid work experiences, especially when platform work is carried out alongside another dependent job, can facilitate additional and varied skill development done via one's secondary platform activity and potentially spur fuller entrepreneurial commitment. However, such skill formation dividends are deficient for part-time hybrids who are mostly driven towards solo self-employment out of necessity, making their journey from proto- to full entrepreneurship less feasible. Our paper provides additional evidence to the marked diversity and hybridity of different forms of (solo)self-employment in modern labour markets.

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[The author] combines a regression discontinuity design with rich data on academic and labor market outcomes for a large sample of Florida students to identify the returns to four-year college for students on the academic margin of college admission. In addition, [the author] develops a theoretical model of college choice with and without credit constraints that allows for intuitive tests of the importance of credit constraints within this population. [The author] finds that students who obtain high school grades just above the threshold value for admissions eligibility at a large public university in Florida are much more likely to attend a four-year college and much less likely to attend a community college than students with grades just below the threshold. The earnings returns to a year of four-year college for affected students are 8.7 per cent, nearly identical to returns to college for the population of Florida high school students. Consistent with the credit constraints hypothesis, poorer students who are more likely to be credit constrained work more while in college and realize higher post-college returns.

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High- and low-wage occupations are expanding rapidly relative to middle-wage occupations in both the US and the [European Union] EU. [The authors] study the reallocation of workers from middle-skill occupations towards the tails of the occupational skill distribution by analyzing changes in age structure within and across occupations. Because occupations typically expand by hiring young workers and contract by curtailing such hiring, [the authors] posit that growing occupations will get younger while shrinking occupations will 'get old'. After verifying this proposition, [the authors] apply this observation to local labor markets in the US to test whether markets that were specialized in middle-skilled occupations in 1980 saw a differential movement of both older and younger workers into occupations at the tails of the skill distribution over the subsequent 25 years. Consistent with aggregate trends, employment in initially middle-skill-intensive labor markets hollowed-out between 1980 and 2005. Employment losses among non-college workers in the middle of the occupational skill distribution were almost entirely countered by employment growth in lower-tail occupations. For college workers, employment losses at the middle were offset in roughly equal measures by gains in the upper- and lower-tails of the occupational skill distribution. But gains at the upper-tail were almost entirely limited to young college workers. Consequently, older college workers are increasingly found in lower-skill, lower-paying occupations.

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The stylized literature on foreign direct investment [FDI] suggests that developing countries should invest in the human capital of their labour force in order to attract foreign direct investment. However, if educational quality in developing countries is uncertain such that formal education is a noisy signal of human capital, it might be rational for multinational enterprises to focus more on job-specific training than on formal education of the labour force. Using cross-country data from the textiles and garments industry, we demonstrate that training indeed has greater impact on firm efficiency in developing countries than formal education of the work force.

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This study investigates whether the choice for a vocationally versus a generally oriented higher education program entails a trade-off between higher employment chances and better matches at the start of the career (when opting for a vocational orientation) and a lower risk of bad match persistence later on (when opting for a general orientation). [The authors] rely on detailed early career spell data of Flemish graduates and assess the vocational orientation of their program by means of the presence of curriculum-based work placement. [The authors] model the program choice (vocationally versus generally oriented), the transition to a good match and the preceding transition to a bad match simultaneously. To account for non-random selection into vocational programs and into bad matches, the timing of events method is combined with an exclusion restriction. After accounting for unobserved heterogeneity, [the authors] do not find any evidence for a trade-off early in the career. This result contributes to the debate about the efficiency of vocationalising tertiary education programs through the implementation of work placement.

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We explore future job creation needs under conditions of demographic, economic, and technological change. First, we estimate the implications for job creation in 2020-2030 of population growth, changes in labor force participation, and the achievement of plausible target unemployment rates, disaggregated by age and gender. Second, we analyze the job creation needs differentiated by country income group. Finally, we examine how accelerated automation could affect job creation needs over the coming decades. Overall, shifting demographics, changing labor force participation rates, reductions in unemployment to the target levels of 8 per cent for youth and 4 per cent for adults, and automation combine to require the creation of approximately 340 million jobs in 2020-2030.

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