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Dual apprenticeship training is a market-driven form of education at the upper secondary level, taking place in firms as well as in vocational schools. So far, little is known about the impact of the business cycle on the number of apprenticeship programs offered by firms. Using panel-data of Swiss cantons from 1988-2004, we find that the influence of the business cycle is statistically significant, but small in size. Instead, supply of apprenticeship programs is driven to a much greater extent by demographic change. Conversely, the number of first-year high school students is not affected by the business cycle. We find, however, that enrollment increases if the population at age 16 grows, but access to high schools does not become more restricted in times of negative growth.

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We examine the dynamic role of education and experience as determinants of wages. It is hypothesised that an employee’s education is an important signal to the employer initially. Over time, the returns to schooling should decrease with labour market experience and increase with initially unobserved ability, since the employer gradually obtains better information on the productivity of an employee. Replicating US studies using data from a large German panel data set (GSOEP), we find no evidence for the employer learning hypothesis for Germany. Differentiating blue-collar and white-collar workers and estimating quantile regressions, however, leads to the conclusion that employer learning takes place for blue-collar workers at the lower end of the wage distribution. We further show, that information on the productivity of an employee is to a large extend private.

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We analyze empirically the effects of urban agglomeration on Italian college graduates' work possibilities as entrepreneurs three years after graduation. We find that each 100,000 inhabitant-increase in the size of the individual's province of work reduces the chances of being an entrepreneur by 0.2-0.3 per cent. This result holds after controlling for regional fixed effects and is robust to instrumenting urbanization. Province's competition, urban amenities and dis-amenities, cost of labor, earning differentials between employees and self-employed workers, unemployment rates and value added per capita account for 40 per cent of the negative urbanization penalty. Our result cannot be explained by the presence of negative large-city differentials in returns to education either. In fact, as long as they succeed in entering the largest markets, young entrepreneurs are able to reap-off the benefits of urbanization externalities: every 100,000-inhabitant increase in the province's population raises entrepreneurs' net monthly income by 0.2-0.3 per cent.

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This paper integrates two strands of literature on overskilling and disability using the 2004 British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS). It finds that the disabled are significantly more likely to be mismatched in the labour market, to suffer from a pay penalty and to have lower job satisfaction, the effects being stronger for the work-limited disabled. Giving workers more discretion over how they perform their work would significantly reduce these negative effects.

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This article applies recent advances in productivity and efficiency measurement to the evaluation of skill-biased technical change. Using the general index approach we are able to establish an explicit and unconstrained time path for non-neutral technical change between production and non-production labour in US manufacturing industries over the 1959-1996 period. Our findings confirm the prevailing interpretation in the labour economics literature that substantial reductions in the relative share of production labour are attributable to a sustained period of non-neutral technical change. However, we find that skill-biased technical change effects are most evident prior to 1983. This pre-dates the diffusion of personal computer technologies in the workplace and the dramatic wage structure changes associated with the 1980s. In contrast to prevailing alternatives, the general index approach also permits us to explain observed shifts in relative labour demand as a combination of price-induced substitution, non-homothetic output effects and skill-biased technical change responses to a range of proposed elements.

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Higher education will clearly be a major contributor to the development of a skilled Australian workforce but must address the rights of all citizens to share in its benefits. This review was established to address the question of whether this critical sector of education is structured, organised and financed to position Australia to compete effectively in the new globalised economy. The panel has concluded that, while the system has great strengths, it faces significant, emerging threats which require decisive action. To address these, major reforms are recommended to the financing and regulatory frameworks for higher education. Key reforms are to increase the number of university graduates by more than one-third and to determine university funding according to student demand using a voucher system. Recommendations affecting the vocational education and training (VET) sector include that: (1) VET and higher education providers should continue to enhance pathways for students through the development and implementation of common terminology and graded assessment in the upper levels of VET; (2) the Australian government negotiate with the states and territories to expand the national regulatory and quality assurance agency to cover the entire tertiary sector (including VET and higher education) and that the government assume full responsibility for the regulation of tertiary education and training in Australia by 2010; (3) the Australian government negotiate with the states and territories to introduce a tertiary entitlement funding model across higher education and VET commencing with the upper levels of VET (diplomas and advanced diplomas) and progressing to the other levels as soon as practicable; (4) the government negotiate with the states and territories to extend income contingent loans to students enrolled in VET diplomas and advanced diplomas; and (5) the Australian government and the governments of the states and territories agree to: establish a single ministerial council with responsibility for all tertiary education and training; improve the scope and coordination of labour market intelligence so that it covers the whole tertiary sector and supports a more responsive and dynamic role for both VET and higher education; and expand the purpose and role of the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) so that it covers the whole tertiary sector. Show less

Several German states recently introduced tuition fees for university education. We investigate whether these tuition fees influence the mobility of university applicants. Based on administrative data of applicants for medical schools in Germany, we estimate the effect of tuition fees on the probability of applying for a university in the home state. We find a small but significant reaction: the probability of applying for a university in the home state falls by two percentage points (baseline: 69 per cent) for high-school graduates who come from a state with tuition fees. Moreover, we find that students with lower high-school grades react more strongly to tuition fees. This might have important effects on the composition of students across states.

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A great deal of attention has been paid in the literature to estimating the impacts of training programs. Much less attention has been devoted to how training agencies assign participants to training programs, and to how these allocation decisions vary with agency resources, the initial skill levels of participants and the prevailing labor market conditions. This paper models the training assignment problem faced by welfare agencies, deriving empirical implications regarding aggregate training policies and testing these implications using data from Welfare-to-Work training programs run by California counties during the 1990s. I find that county welfare agencies do not seem to follow a simple returns-maximization model in their training assignment decisions. The results show that, as suggested by political economy models, the local political environment has a strong effect on training policies. In particular, I find that going from a Republican to a Democratic majority in a county's Board of Supervisors has a strong effect on training policies, significantly increasing the proportion of welfare recipients receiving human capital development training.

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We analyze the occupational mobility of immigrants between their origin countries and Spain and its determinants. We use microdata from the Encuesta Nacional de Inmigrantes to compute an internationally harmonized occupational status index (ISEI) that permits to quantify and properly analyze this kind of mobility. The obtained evidence shows that, in general, immigrants experience a strong occupational downgrading in Spain when compared to their origin countries. This fact is due to the strong downgrading they experience when entering the Spanish labour market and their low improvement in the following years.

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Using an internet collected dataset, we will provide some empirical evidence on the information that Dutch high school students possess before their decision on tertiary education participation. The sample is prone to selective participation and high attrition, but we detect little systematic effects and inconsistent reporting of probability distribution is not more frequent than in controlled settings. We find little support for patterns that one would expect from individuals having private information. Girls expect substantially lower earnings in all schooling scenarios, but implicit rate of returns do not differ from those anticipated by boys. We find no evidence of expected risk compensation.

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