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This paper analyzes the impact of a leading entrepreneurship education program on college students' entrepreneurship competencies and intentions using an instrumental variables approach in a difference-in-differences framework. We exploit that the program was offered to students at one location of a school but not at another location of the same school. Location choice (and thereby treatment) is instrumented by the relative distance of locations to parents' place of residence. The results show that the program does not have the intended effects: the effect on students' self-assessed entrepreneurial skills is insignificant and the effect on the intention to become an entrepreneur is even significantly negative.

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The World Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Database is an online repository developed by UNESCO-UNEVOC. It aims to provide up-to-date information on TVET systems worldwide. This country profile for Ghana outlines the TVET mission, strategy and legislation and provides an overview of the TVET systems - formal, non-formal and informal, governance and financing, TVET teachers and trainers, the qualifications framework and current reforms and major projects. Show less

In this paper we estimate the short-term effects of a French retraining program that was intended to improve reemployment prospects of displaced workers. Our empirical analysis uses non-experimental data collected by the French Ministry of Labour. Transitions from unemployment to permanent vs. temporary jobs are assumed to be generated by a dependent competing risks duration model. Moreover we assume that program entry but also direct transitions from the program to employment are both affected by a selectivity process depending on observable and unobservable individual heterogeneity. We find mixed evidence regarding relevance of the program. For displaced workers who join the program, program participation increases the average probability to obtain a permanent job by 8 points (passing from 42 to 50%). However, for displaced workers who do not join the program, this average probability would have been increased by 28 points (passing from 43 to 71%) had they participated in the program. We conclude that, although the program has been globally effective, it has been insufficiently proposed to the displaced workers who would have benefited the most from it.

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This paper offers a first comprehensive study of the relationship between labor market institutions and policies and labor market performance in the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, which in the last two decades experienced radical economic and institutional transformations. Based on a new and unique hand-collected dataset, the paper first documents the evolution of labor market institutions and policies in the transition region. The data show a clear trend towards liberalization of labor markets, especially in the countries of the former Soviet Union, but also substantial differences across the countries studied. Second, the paper takes advantage of the large variation in the key economic and institutional variables to test several predictions concerning the role of institutions and polices in explaining labor market outcomes. The results of our econometric analysis are generally consistent with the view that institutions matter for labor market outcomes, and that deregulation of the labor markets improves their performance. The analysis also suggests several significant interactions between different institutions, which are in line with the idea of reform complementarity and broad reform packages. We also show that there are important advantages of focusing on a broader set of labor market outcomes, and not only on the unemployment rate, which until now has been the main approach in the empirical literature.

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We study how class size and composition affect the academic and labor market performances of college students, two crucial policy questions given the secular increase in college enrollment. We rely on the random assignment of students to teaching classes. Our results suggest that a one standard deviation increase in the class-size would result in a 0.1 standard deviation deterioration of the average grade. Further, the effect is heterogeneous as female and higher income students seem almost immune to the size of the class. Also, the effects on performance of class composition in terms of gender and ability appears to be inverse U-shaped. Finally, a reduction of 20 students (one standard deviation) in one's class size has a positive effect on monthly wages of about 80 Euros (115 USD) or six per cent over the average.

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This publication is the final report from the technical and vocational education and training (TVET) planning meeting held at the Imperial Impala Hotel in Bangkok. The meeting brought together key stakeholders from the Asia region to discuss major issues and concerns for the TVET sector, in order to share challenges and benefit from a collaborative approach. The meeting highlighted six key issues for TVET: (1) access; (2) teachers and other TVET staff; (3) resources; (4) industry linkages; (5) quality; and (6) policy issues. A number of recommendations are listed and possible projects are outlined. The contents are: Introduction; Participants; Recommendations; Program; Presentations; Issues summary; Projects; Project proposals; Areas for regional cooperation.

The collection of documents from this meeting is indexed at TD/TNC 79.161; selected papers are indexed from TD/TNC 79.151 to TD/TNC 79.160. Show less

This document reports on four studies into the cooperation between technical and vocational education (TVE) institutions and the world of work. These studies were part of a series of studies on existing approaches to such cooperation initiated by UNESCO within its UNEVOC Project. The studies took place in Hungary, Romania, Sweden and the Russian Federation. They were undertaken by experts from the countries themselves on the basis of guidelines provided by Dr. R. Barry Hobart, Consultant to UNESCO. A synthesis is provided by Dr. Hobart to identify and describe the common variables that are operating with respect to education for the world of work in each of the case studies included. The report is divided into two sections. The first section contains the studies from Hungary, Romania and Sweden that examined the policies and legislation in TVE designed to enhance cooperation with the world of work. The second section reports on the study from the Russian Federation that investigated aspects of cooperation between the training institution and the individual enterprise in the implementation of such policies. Show less

The project Entrepreneurship Education in the Arab States is implemented jointly by the UNESCO-UNEVOC International Centre for Technical and Vocational Education and Training, Bonn and the UNESCO Regional Bureau for Education in the Arab States, Beirut. It is funded by the StratREAL Foundation, United Kingdom. Entrepreneurship education (EPE) in the Arab States includes two main components: (1) the collection and dissemination of innovative and successful experiences of EPE from different countries of the region (2009-2010); and (2) providing technical support for the development of strategic plans to facilitate the incorporation of the concept of EPE in education systems (2010-2012). The National Centre for Human Resources Development (a UNEVOC Centre in Jordan) had been commissioned for the implementation of component one. Educational experts from four countries (Egypt, Jordan, Oman and Tunisia) prepared case studies on the current situation of entrepreneurship education. Based on the four country case studies, a regional synthesis report was prepared, which highlights the national and regional contexts and expectations of EPE in the Arab region. The case studies and the regional synthesis report are contained within this document as follows: A case study of Jordan / Munther Masri; A case study of Tunisia / Mohamed Jemni; A case study of Oman / Ahmed M. Al-Ghassani; A case study of Egypt / Aboubakr A. Badawi; Regional synthesis report / Munther Masri. Show less

This paper estimates the impact of training incidence and duration on employment transitions accounting for the endogeneity of program participation and duration. We specify a very flexible bivariate random effects probit model for employment and training participation and we use Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques for estimation. We develop a simulation approach that uses the estimated coefficients and individual specific effects from the MCMC iterations to calculate the posterior distributions of different treatment effects of interest. Our estimation results imply positive effects of training on the employment probability of the treated, lying between 12 and 21 percentage points ten quarters after program start. The effects are higher for women than for men and higher in West Germany than in East Germany. Further, we find that the effect of training versus waiting underestimates the effect of training versus no training in the medium and long run by a third. Finally, our results show that longer planned enrolment lengths of three and four quarters as opposed to just two quarters lead to an increase in employment rates in the medium and long run by four to eleven percentage points.

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Does emigration really drain human capital accumulation in origin countries? This paper explores a unique household survey purposely designed and conducted to answer this research question. We analyze the case of Cape Verde, a country with allegedly the highest ‘brain drain’ in Africa, despite a marked record of income and human capital growth in recent decades. Our micro data enables us to propose the first explicit test of ‘brain gain’ arguments according to which the prospects of own future migration can positively impact educational attainment. According to our results, a 10 [percentage points] increase in the probability of own future migration may improve the average probability of completing intermediate secondary schooling by eight [percentage points] for individuals who do not migrate before age 16. Strikingly, this same 10 [percentage points] increase may raise the probability of completing intermediate secondary schooling by 11 [percentage points] for an individual whose parents were both non migrants when the educational decision was made. Our findings are robust to the choice of instruments and econometric model. Overall, we find that there may be substantial human capital gains from lowering migration barriers.

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