Search Results | VOCEDplus, the international tertiary education and research database

Choosing the field of study in post-secondary education: do expected earnings matter?

This paper examines the determinants of the choice of the major when the length of studies is uncertain, by using a ... Show more
This paper examines the determinants of the choice of the major when the length of studies is uncertain, by using a framework in which students entering post-secondary education are assumed to anticipate their future earnings. For that purpose, [the authors] use French data coming from the 1992 and 1998 Generation surveys collected by the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches sur l'Emploi et les Qualifications (CEREQ, Marseille). [The authors'] econometric approach is based on a semi-structural three-equations model, which is identified thanks to some exclusion restrictions. [The authors] exploit in particular exogenous variations in the earnings returns associated with the majors across the business cycle, in order to identify the causal effect of expected earnings on the probability of choosing a given major. Relying on a three component mixture distribution, [the authors] account for correlation between the unobserved individual-specific terms affecting the preferences for the majors, the unobserved individual-specific factors entering the equation determining the length of studies within each major, and that affecting the labor market earnings equation. Following Arcidiacono and Jones (2003), [the authors] use the [expectation–maximization] EM algorithm with a sequential maximization step to produce consistent parameter estimates. Simulating for each given major a 10 per cent increase in the expected earnings suggests that expected earnings have a statistically significant but quantitatively small impact on the allocation of students across majors.
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Authors: Beffy, Magali; Fougere, Denis; Maurel, Arnaud

Date: 2009

Geographic subjects: France; Europe

Resource type: Report, paper or authored book

Series name: IZA discussion paper

Subjects: Teaching and learning; Students; Career development ... [+] Show more
You're the one that I want!: public employment and women's labor market outcomes

In most countries, the public sector hires disproportionally more women than men. We document gender differences in ... Show more
In most countries, the public sector hires disproportionally more women than men. We document gender differences in employment, transition probabilities, hours, and wages in the public and private sector using microdata for the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Spain. We then build a search and matching model where men and women decide if to participate and if to enter private or public sector labor markets. We calibrate our model separately to the four countries. Running counterfactual experiments, we quantify whether the selection of women into the public sector is driven by: (i) lower gender wage gaps and thus relatively higher wages for women in the public sector, (ii) possibilities of better conciliation of work and family life for public sector workers, (iii) greater job security in the public compared to the private sector, or (iv) intrinsic preferences for public sector occupations. We find that, quantitatively, women's higher public sector wage premia and their preferences for working in the public sector explain most of the selection. We calculate the monetary value of public sector job security and work-life balance premia, for both men and women, and we estimate how higher public sector wages and employment affect male and female unemployment, inactivity rates, and wages differently.
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Authors: Gomes, Pedro; Kuehn, Zoe

Date: 2019

Geographic subjects: Great Britain; France; Spain ... [+] Show more

Resource type: Report, paper or authored book

Series name: IZA discussion paper

Subjects: Employment; Gender; Income ... [+] Show more
High-skilled immigration policy in Europe

Whether Europe will be able to stand up to its internal and external challenges crucially depends on its ability to ... Show more
Whether Europe will be able to stand up to its internal and external challenges crucially depends on its ability to manage its internal mobility and inflows of international migrants. Using a unique expert opinion survey, we document that Europe needs skilled migrants, and skill mismatch is to be expected. A review of current immigration policies shows that despite a number of positive recent developments Europe lacks a consistent strategy to address this challenge effectively, paralyzed by the notion of ‘fortress’ Europe, which we argue should be abandoned. Since significant political tensions can be expected between native actors that favor and disfavor further immigration, improving European immigration policies and procedures is a formidable challenge. This task involves the need to improve Europe’s image among potential migrants, especially the high-skilled ones.
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Authors: Kahanec, Martin; Zimmermann, Klaus F.

Corporate authors: Institute for the Study of Labour (Germany) (IZA)

Date: 2010

Geographic subjects: Europe; Denmark; Finland ... [+] Show more Britain">Great Britain; [-] Show less

Resource type: Report, paper or authored book

Series name: IZA discussion paper

Subjects: Migration; Labour market; Policy ... [+] Show more
The difficult school-to-work transition of high school dropouts: evidence from a field experiment

This paper investigates the effects of the labor market experience of high school dropouts four years after leaving ... Show more
This paper investigates the effects of the labor market experience of high school dropouts four years after leaving school by sending fictitious resumes to real job postings in France. Compared to those who have stayed unemployed since leaving school, the callback rate is not raised for those with employment experience, whether it is subsidized or non-subsidized, in the market or non-market sector, if there is no training accompanied by skill certification. In particular, [the authors] find no stigma effect associated with subsidized or non-market sector work experience. Moreover, training accompanied by skill certification improves youth prospects only when the local unemployment rate is sufficiently low, which occurs in one fifth of the commuting zones only.
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Authors: Cahuc, Pierre; Carcillo, Stephane; Minea, Andreea

Date: 2017

Geographic subjects: France; Europe

Resource type: Report, paper or authored book

Series name: IZA discussion paper

Subjects: Youth; Labour market; Employment ... [+] Show more
Educational attainment and labor market performance: an analysis of immigrants in France

Using a recent survey of immigrants to France, [the authors] provide a detailed analysis of the educational attainm ... Show more
Using a recent survey of immigrants to France, [the authors] provide a detailed analysis of the educational attainment and labor market performance of various sub-population groups in France. [The] results indicate that immigrants to France are less educated than the native born and that these differences can be tracked down to differences in socioeconomic background for most groups of immigrants. Similarly, there is a significant wage gap between immigrant and native-born workers, but this is reduced and sometimes disappears after correcting for selection into employment. In most cases the remaining differences in education and labor market outcomes seem related to the area of origin of the immigrant as well as where the education of the immigrant is obtained.
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Authors: Akguc, Mehtap; Ferrer, Ana

Date: 2015

Geographic subjects: France; Europe

Resource type: Report, paper or authored book

Series name: IZA discussion paper

Subjects: Migration; Labour market; Performance ... [+] Show more
Estimating gender differences in access to jobs

This paper proposes a new measure of gender differences in access to jobs based on a job assignment model. This mea ... Show more
This paper proposes a new measure of gender differences in access to jobs based on a job assignment model. This measure is the probability ratio of getting a job for females and males at each rank of the wage ladder. We derive a non-parametric estimator of this access measure and estimate it for French full-time executives aged 40-45 in the private sector. Our results show that the gender difference in the probability of getting a job increases along the wage ladder from nine per cent to 50 per cent. Females thus have a significantly lower access to high-paid jobs than to low-paid jobs.
Abstract from publisher's website. Show less

Authors: Gobillon, Laurent; Meurs, Dominique; Roux, Sebastien

Date: 2012

Geographic subjects: France; Europe

Resource type: Report, paper or authored book

Series name: IZA discussion paper

Subjects: Gender; Employment; Income ... [+] Show more
Bridge jobs in Europe

We study the transitions from career to bridge jobs and to permanent retirement by European males aged 55 to 70 at ... Show more
We study the transitions from career to bridge jobs and to permanent retirement by European males aged 55 to 70 at the time of the interview in the late 2000s. We find that only 10.54 per cent of the workers in our sample who were in a career job at age 50 have moved to a bridge job by the time of the interview, much less than what [is] usually found in the United States. We also show that the exogenous increases in minimum retirement age that occurred during the past 20 years have had different effects in Central / Northern Europe (Austria, Switzerland, The Netherlands and Sweden) and in Mediterranean Europe (Italy and Spain). In the North, transitions into bridge jobs have increased, with no significant effect on transitions into retirement. In the South, transitions into permanent retirement have decreased, with no significant effect on transitions into bridge jobs.
Abstract from publisher's website. Show less

Authors: Brunello, Giorgio; Langella, Monica

Date: 2012

Geographic subjects: Europe; Austria; Netherlands ... [+] Show more

Resource type: Report, paper or authored book

Series name: IZA discussion paper

Subjects: Employment; Gender; Participation
Human resources and innovation: total factor productivity and foreign human capital

The objective of this paper is to analyse the role of migrants in innovation in Europe. [The authors] use Total Fac ... Show more
The objective of this paper is to analyse the role of migrants in innovation in Europe. [The authors] use Total Factor Productivity as a measure of innovation and focus on the three largest European countries - France, Germany and the United Kingdom - in the years 1994-2007. Unlike previous research, which mainly employs a regional approach, [the authors] analyse the link between migration and innovation at the sectoral level. This allows [the authors] to measure the direct contribution of migrants in the sector in which they are actually employed. Moreover, it allows a distinction between the real contribution of migrants to innovation from possible inter-sectoral complementarities, which might as well foster innovation.
[The authors] control for the different components of human-capital, such as age, education and diversity of origin. To address the possible endogeneity of migration [the authors] draw on an instrumental variable strategy originally devised by Card (2001) and adapt it at the sector level. The results show that overall migrants are relevant in all sectors, but some important differences emerge across sectors: highly-educated migrants show a larger positive effect in the high-tech sectors, while middle- and low-educated ones are more relevant in manufacturing. The diversity of countries of origin contributes to innovation only in the services sectors, confirming that in empirical analyses at the regional or national level the diversity measure might capture the complementarity between sectors rather than the contribution of different national skills.
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Authors: Fassio, Claudio; Kalantaryan, Sona; Venturini, Alessandra

Date: 2015

Geographic subjects: Europe; France; Germany ... [+] Show more

Resource type: Report, paper or authored book

Series name: IZA discussion paper

Subjects: Skills and knowledge; Migration; Innovation ... [+] Show more
The impact of immigration on the employment dynamics of European regions

This paper provides the first evidence on the regional impact of immigration on native employment in a cross-countr ... Show more
This paper provides the first evidence on the regional impact of immigration on native employment in a cross-country framework. By exploiting the richness of the European Labour Force Surveys and past censuses, we show that the rise in the share of immigrants across European regions over the 2010-2019 period had a modest impact on the employment-to-population rate of natives. However, the effects are highly uneven across regions and workers, and over time. First, the short-run estimates show adverse employment effects in response to immigration, while these effects disappear in the longer run. Second, low-educated native workers experience employment losses due to immigration, whereas high-educated ones are more likely to experience employment gains. Third, the presence of institutions that provide employment protection and high coverage of collective wage agreements exert a protective effect on native employment. Finally, economically dynamic regions can better absorb immigrant workers, resulting in little or no effect on the native workforce.
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Authors: Edo, Anthony; Ozguzel, Cem

Date: 2023

Geographic subjects: Europe; Austria; Belgium ... [+] Show more

Resource type: Report, paper or authored book

Series name: IZA discussion paper

Subjects: Labour market; Employment; Migration
The great compression of the French wage structure, 1969-2008

Wage inequality decreased continuously in France from 1969 to 2008. In contrast to the US and the UK, this period w ... Show more
Wage inequality decreased continuously in France from 1969 to 2008. In contrast to the US and the UK, this period was also characterised by a substantial increase in the educational attainment of the labour force. This paper investigates whether differences in the timing of educational expansion over the last 40 years can explain the divergent evolution of upper tail wage inequality in France relative to other countries. Using a model with imperfect substitution between experience groups, the estimates suggest that the rapid increase in the supply of educated workers during the 1970s and 1990s produced a substantial decline in the skill premium within cohorts. As a result, between a third and half of the decline in wage inequality at the top of the distribution in France during this period is explained by the increase in the educational attainment of the labour force.
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Authors: Verdugo, Gregory

Date: 2014

Geographic subjects: France; Europe

Resource type: Report, paper or authored book

Series name: IZA discussion paper

Subjects: Income; Labour market; Qualifications ... [+] Show more