Search results for "J24"
showing 10 items of 33 documents
Back to School : Labor-Market Returns to Higher Vocational Schooling
2019
This paper examines the labor-market returns to a new form of postsecondary vocational education: vocational master's degrees. We use individual fixed effects models on a matched sample of students and non-students from Finland to capture any time-invariant differences across individuals. We find that attendance in vocational master's programs leads to an earnings increase of more than seven percent five years after entry. The estimated effect remains positive even if selection on unobservables is twice as strong as selection on observables. Earnings gains are similar by gender and age, but they are marginally higher for those in the health sector than for those in the business or technolog…
Who turns to entrepreneurship later in life? - Push and pull in Finnish rural and urban areas
2014
Age is an important factor in entrepreneurship. The paths into entrepreneurship at a later age may be varied. Self-employment in later life may be either a form of partial retirement or a career option. Older individuals may also be pushed into self-employment. The focus of this paper is on the career choices of older individuals and their background motivations in Finland. The purpose is to analyse the factors and motives in terms of the push and pull dichotomy that lead individuals to enter self-employment at older ages in different types of labour markets in Finland, viz., rural and urban areas. Although some studies have focused on transitions to self-employment among older workers, que…
Labor market participation, employability and and basic skills: the French case
2013
En ligne sur http://cemapre.iseg.utl.pt/educonf/2e3/files/submissions_to_web/Branche-Seigeot%20Aline.doc; The development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and the important technological but also organizational innovations during the last decades have transformed the labor market and the jobs nature. One major consequence of this on employment has been the gradual rise in qualifications' structure sought and demanded by employers. However, the expansion of higher education contributed to depreciate diplomas proportionately more widespread in the labor market due to a greater skills' heterogeneity of their owners. Since high basic skills levels protect against unemployment…
The paradoxical management of service skills
2015
This paper focuses on service skills which are mobilized by front office agents when they are involved with customers. These skills are most of the time tacit. We consider that the way in which firms recognize these skills and contribute to their development is an important management issue. It is all the more important that a lot of jobs combine poor levels of qualification and highly situated skills.
Returns to Schooling in Spain. How Reliable Are IV Estimates?
2001
This paper studies the Ordinary Least-Squared (OLS) and Instrumental Variables (IV) estimates of the returns to schooling for male workers in Spain. OLS estimates are often biased due to the endogeneity of schooling, measurement errors or omitted variables. Proper IV estimates correct this bias. The reliability of family background, natural experiments (based on changes in the education system and season of birth) and the availability of a college in the province is checked using Spanish data. The results suggest that background and college availability are valid instruments and that the IV estimates of the returns to schooling are higher than OLS estimates. These results are in line with t…
The labour market consequences of self-employment spells:European evidence
2008
Hundreds of thousands of Europeans enter self-employment each year, but because self-employment spells are typically brief, many of them exit soon after entry. We examine how those who return to paid-employment fare on the labour market using the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). Like earlier evidence for the US, ours indicate that, in general, brief spells of self-employment do not increase average hourly earnings upon return to paid-employment. For highly educated men, an additional year of self-employment actually decreases their earnings by 4-5% relative to a year of continued wage employment. We also find that brief spells of self-employment are associated with increased proba…
The Return-to-Entrepreneurship Puzzle
2013
The returns to entrepreneurship are monetary and non-monetary. We offer new evidence on these returns using a large sample of genetically identical male twins. Our within-twin analysis suggests that OLS estimates are downwards, and traditional first-differenced panel data estimates upwards biased. We find no differences in the earnings of men with either low or high education. Our within-twin analysis of non-monetary returns shows that entrepreneurs with low education work longer hours and have greater responsibilities, but also face a reduced risk of divorce and less monotonous work tasks. The same does not apply to highly educated entrepreneurs.
Employment sector and pay gaps: Genetic and environmental influences
2012
This paper examines the role of genetic factors and shared environment in explaining the choice of working in the public sector and public-private sector pay gaps. The analyses are done using data for Finnish twins that span the period from 1990 to 2004. The data are based on two sources. The first data are Finnish Twin Cohort conducted by Department of Public Health in University of Helsinki. These data have been matched with the Finnish Longitudinal Employer-Employee Data (FLEED) kept by Statistics Finland. The standard behavioural genetics decomposition and DF (DeFries and Fulker 1985) analyses indicate that public sector employment is broadly influenced by the genetic factors by around …
How individual characteristics shape the structure of social networks
2015
Abstract We study how students’ social networks emerge by documenting systematic patterns in the process of friendship formation of incoming students; these students all start out in a new environment and thus jointly create a new social network. As a specific novelty, we consider cooperativeness, time and risk preferences – elicited experimentally – together with factors like socioeconomic and personality characteristics. We find a number of robust predictors of link formation and of the position within the social network (local and global network centrality). In particular, cooperativeness has a complex association with link formation. We also find evidence for homophily along several dim…
A bargaining model of Farrell inefficiency
1998
Abstract An enormous number of empirical papers have estimated technical efficiency, the distance of firms inside a frontier, following the model of Farrell (Farrell, 1957. The measurement of productive efficiency. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A 120 (3), 253–290). We propose a theory that explains the distance these empirical papers seek to measure. The theory is based on the idea that workers can bargain low `effort' (high crew sizes etc.) if they and the firm have some monopoly power. We provide simple theoretical expressions for the empirical measures of technical and allocative efficiency and compare them to those in the statistical literature. We also consider the re…