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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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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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Any serious empirical study of factor substitutability has to allow the data to display complementarity as well as substitutability. The standard approach reflecting this idea is a translog specification - this is also the approach used by numerous studies analysing the relative capital-skill complementarity hypothesis formulated by Griliches (1969). According to this hypothesis, the degree of substitutability between skilled labour and capital is lower than that for unskilled labour and capital. Yet, the results of empirical studies investigating this hypothesis are controversial. This paper offers a straightforward explanation: using a translog approach reduces the issue of factor substitutability or complementarity to a question of cost shares. Our review of translog studies mentioned in Hamermesh’s (1993) summary on the demand for heterogeneous labour demonstrates that this argument is empirically relevant - all these studies can be reconciled with each other on the basis of the cost-share argument.

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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 quantifies the long-run impact of exposure to youth minimum wages and sheds light on its mechanisms. It uses remarkable longitudinal data spanning for twenty years and explores legislative changes that define groups of teenagers exposed for different durations. After controlling for the contemporaneous impact of the minimum wage, its long-run impact translates into: an overall wage premium, consistent with an upgrading in the quality of jobs offered; a flatter tenure-earnings profile, consistent with lower initial investment in firm-specific training. Interestingly, the overall wage premium increases with exposure and the tenure-earnings profile is flatter the longer the exposure.

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The globalization of economic activity and the rapid technological developments require a more qualified workforce with multiple skills. As a result, rapid obsolescence of competences makes the capacity to update continuously and develop the required skills the key to competitiveness and growth. Moreover, under the pressure of competitive forces, developments in the HRM [human resources management] practices become increasingly important. The first part of this article draws from the findings of the Cranfield survey, in which Greece participated three times (in 1993, 1996 and 1999), in order to present an overall picture of HRM in Greece. The second part analyzes the results of a larger European Union project to study skills benchmarking in Europe, in which Greece participated along with eight European countries. The results from the Greek study do not show considerable deviations from the whole European sample. Some of the main conclusions of the study are: training can no longer be treated as a method to cure skills deficiencies, but rather as a continuous, life-long learning process with considerable impact to the growth of the firms; acquiring human skills presents the greatest challenge for training; and adaptability and self-learning are necessary elements that need to be incorporated in the educational system from its early stages.

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This study evaluates and compares the effectiveness of two alternative training schemes for the unemployed: short, job-search oriented training and long, human capital oriented training. We investigate the impact dynamics of these programs considering both unemployment and employment duration. Our analysis uses a rich administrative longitudinal data set for Germany where both programs were implemented at the same time. Our estimation strategy flexibly accounts for dynamic selection on observables and unobservables as well as heterogeneous treatment effects. The results indicate that short-term training schemes can be an effective tool to reduce unemployment in the long run, in particular if participation occurs early during unemployment. Long-term training schemes increase the average duration of employment spells more strongly than short-term training. However, they increase the expected unemployment duration if they are started early during unemployment. This negative short-run impact of long-term training is an important driver of its overall effectiveness.

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In order to remain competitive, firms need to keep the quantity and composition of jobs close to the optimal for their given output. Since the beginning of the transition period, Russian industrial firms have been widely reporting that the quantity and composition of hired labor is far from being close to optimal. This paper discusses what kinds of firms in the Russian manufacturing sector are not able to optimize their employment and why. Do they suffer from a labor shortage induced by rapid growth, or are they still struggling with employment overhang? What are the occupations and skills in which there is a supposed surplus or shortage? What factors affect the probability that a firm will report non-optimal employment and be unable to solve this difficulty? Where is the labor excess/shortage concentrated and what makes it persistent? Finally, we discuss the costs of non-optimal employment. The analysis presented in this article is based on the data from a large-scale survey of Russian manufacturing firms.

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The cause of immigrant education mismatch in the host country labour market might not necessarily be discrimination or imperfect transferability of human capital, as argued in previous studies. Immigrants who have gained professional experience in the home country in jobs below their education level might be assessed by host country employers as having lower abilities and skills than those expected from their educational qualifications. Using the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia we show that a significant part of the variation in the immigrants’ probability to be over-/under-educated in the Australian labour market can be explained by having been over-/under-educated in the last job in the home country.

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The transition from school-to-work has been a burning issue in most countries for the last decades. So far research on this topic has not been conclusive, and it is still not clear whether transition problems are just individual, linked to the type of education followed at upper-secondary level, or just a prolongation of problems arising from poor school performance during compulsory education. This paper uses a unique Swiss longitudinal data-set, which includes information on PISA 2000 scores and the pathways chosen after completing compulsory school. Descriptive results show that students in vocational training, who obtained lower PISA results, are significantly more likely to be in an inadequate employment situation two years after finishing vocational training. Further analysis shows, however, that it is the type of vocational training followed at upper-secondary level that is decisive for the success in the transition. Nevertheless, individual PISA scores have an indirect impact on the transition results, as they are an important factor explaining which pupils are more likely to get into an intellectually demanding vocational training and which ones are not.

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