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Public sector sponsored training was implemented at a large scale during the transition process in East Germany. Based on new administrative data, we estimate the differential effects of three different programs for East Germany during the transition process. We apply a dynamic multiple treatment approach using matching based on inflows into unemployment. We find positive medium- and long-run employment effects for the largest program, Provision of Specific Professional Skills and Techniques. In contrast, the programs practice firms and retraining show no consistent positive employment effects. Furthermore, no program results in a reduction of benefit recipiency and the effects are quite similar for females and males.

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This paper investigates whether the interaction between family background and school tracking affects human capital accumulation. Our a priori view is that more tracking should reinforce the role of parental privilege, and thereby reduce equality of opportunity. Compared to the current literature, which focuses on early outcomes, such as test scores at 13 and 15, we look at later outcomes, including literacy, dropout rates, college enrolment, employability and earnings. While we do not confirm previous results that tracking reinforces family background effects on literacy, we do confirm our view when looking at educational attainment and labour market outcomes. When looking at early wages, we find that parental background effects are stronger when tracking starts earlier. We reconcile the apparently contrasting results on literacy, educational attainment and earnings by arguing that the signalling role of formal education - captured by attainment - matters more than actual skills - measured by literacy - in the early stages of labour market experience.

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This paper revisits the issue of the intra-household allocation of education expenditure with the recently available India Human Development Survey which refers to 2005 and covers both urban and rural areas. In addition to the traditional Engel method, the paper utilizes a Hurdle model to disentangle the decision to enroll (incur any educational expenditure) and the decision of how much to spend on education, conditional on enrolling. The paper finds that the traditional Engel method often fails to pick up gender bias where it exists not only because of the aggregation of data at the household-level but also because of aggregation of the two decisions in which gender can have opposite signs. There exists little evidence of gender bias in the primary school age group (age 5-9); however, pro-male bias in educational expenditure is observed in many Indian states in the age group 10-14. In contrast, gender discrimination in the secondary school age group 15-19 mainly takes place through the decision to enroll boys and not girls, and not through differential expenditure on girls and boys. Overall, the results reveal large regional disparities in the nature and existence of gender bias in education.

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This paper uses two large multi-country datasets on educational scores - [Programme for International Student Assessment] PISA and [Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study] TIMSS - to examine the performance of Russia in comparative light as well as the factors associated with differences in educational outcomes in Russia. Despite the perception of a positive educational legacy, Russian scores are not stellar and have mostly deteriorated. Using an education production function, we distinguish between individual and family background factors and those relating to the school and institutional environment. We use pooled data, as well as cross sectional evidence, to look at the variation across countries before looking at within-country variation in Russia. We find - both in the cross-country estimates as also those using just Russia data - that a number of individual and family variables in particular, such as parental educational levels, are robustly associated with better educational outcomes. Institutional variables also matter - notably student-teacher ratios and indicators of school autonomy - but there are also some clear particularities in the Russian case.

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There is an apparent inconsistency in the existing literature on graduate employment in the UK. While analyses of rates of return to graduates or graduate markups show high returns, suggesting that demand has kept up with a rapidly rising supply of graduates, the literature on over-education suggests that many graduates are unable to find employment in graduate jobs and the proportion over-educated has risen over time. Using a simple supply and demand model applied to UK data that defines graduate jobs in terms of the proportion of graduates and/or the graduate earnings markup within occupations, we find that the employment of graduates in non-graduate jobs has declined over time. Hence, there is no evidence of an over-production of graduates in the UK.

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Using the Canadian General Social Survey we compute returns to post-secondary education relative to high-school. Unlike previous research using Canadian data, our dataset allows us to control for ability selection into higher education. We find strong evidence of positive ability selection into all levels of post-secondary education for men and weaker positive selection for women. Since the ability selection is stronger for higher levels of education, particularly for university, the difference in returns between university and college or trades education decreases slightly after accounting for ability bias. However, a puzzling large gap persists, with university-educated men still earning over 20% more than men with college or trades education. Moreover, contrary to previous Canadian literature that reports higher returns for women, we document that the [Ordinary Least Squares] OLS hourly wage returns to university education are the same for men and women. OLS returns are higher for women only if weekly or yearly wages are considered instead, because university-educated women work more hours than the average. Nevertheless, once we account for ability selection into post-secondary education, we generally find higher returns for women than for men for all wage measures as a result of the stronger ability selection for men.

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This paper considers the impact of education and training on both individual and co-worker pay and establishment performance using the matched employer-employee data in [Workplace Employee Relations Survey] WERS 2004, the panel dataset 1998-2004 and the new Financial Performance Questionnaire. This enables us to assess the impact of workplace education and training using both subjective (managers’ assessments) and objective data on productivity, profits and establishment survival. We establish that workplace education and training can have positive impacts on establishment financial performance, survival and growth. In contrast to extant studies, it was found that the square and the interaction between own and co-workers years of training also have a positive and significant impact on hourly pay. We find evidence indicating that establishments with 60% or more of workers trained have a higher establishment performance and also have a powerful impact on the likelihood of establishment survival.

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This study analyses the effects of public sector sponsored vocational training on individual unemployment and employment duration in East Germany. The data is taken from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). The empirical analysis is limited to training measures that took place between July 1990 and June 1993. To resolve the intriguing sample selection problem, i.e. to find an adequate control group for the group of trainees, we employ matching methods. The training effect is be estimated by using a discrete time hazard rate model. In the empirical analysis no evidence can be found to show that participation in public vocational training significantly decreases unemployment duration or increases employment duration.

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Notwithstanding increased educational expenditure, Portugal continues to record poor educational outcomes. Underlining the weak expenditure-educational success link, a large body of work in educational economics displays that there is a tenuous relationship between a range of school inputs and cognitive achievement. Among others, the inability to establish a clear link between inputs and success has been attributed to the difficulty of controlling for unobserved attributes such as ability, motivation and interest. Against this background, and inspired by a large body of work in educational psychology which explicitly measures constructs such as educational motivation and interest, this paper examines whether a child's interest in school has any bearing on educational success after controlling for the kinds of variables typically used in educational economics analyses. We rely on two data sets collected in Portugal in 1998 and 2001 and examine the interest-educational success link using both cross-section and panel data. Our estimates suggest that after controlling for time-invariant unobservable traits and for the simultaneous determination of interest and achievement, there is little support for the idea that prior interest in school has a bearing on future educational success.

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This study attempts to explain why the transition to a market economy is skill-biased. It shows unequivocal evidence on increased skill wage premium and supply of skills in transition economies. It examines whether similar skill-favouring shifts in the Russian and US economies are driven by the same set of factors. [The] analysis elaborates on the model of alternative theories of the increased wage skill premium and then evaluates three main hypotheses: skill-biased technological change, the market adjustment hypothesis, and the institutional factor hypothesis. To test these hypotheses, the study uses unique linked employer-employee data that spans the 16 years of the Soviet and transition periods in Russia (1985-2000), with a special emphasis on data quality, measurement errors, and retrospective biases. The main conclusion is that there is no uni-causal and time-invariant explanation for skill-biased changes in wages and employment in the Russian economy. The increased skill wage premium has been driven mainly by institutional factors during the early period and by productivity and technological change during the late transition period, and reinforced by market adjustment of wage ratio to the true differences in labour productivity.

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