Disparities in children's skills at the start of primary education raise the question whether these differences persist throughout primary school and also whether performance gaps by student characteristics change during this period. Using Dutch data, we examine skill development from first to sixth grade. Our findings indicate a strong relationship between early skill levels and those at the end of primary school. Sixth-grade disparities largely stem from initial differences. Performance gaps by socioeconomic status and sex increase across the primary school period but decrease by migration background. These findings highlight the persistence of early skill inequality during the primary school period.
Taking advantage of unique longitudinal task data from the Berea Panel Study, we provide a new examination of the gender wage gap, paying particular attention to gender differences in types of work experience. Access to longitudinal, individual-level job-task information, along with unique time-allocation information, allows us to produce quantitative measures of current and past tasks. We provide the first empirical evidence on gender differences in time spent on tasks and show that gender differences in task-specific experience, in particular high-skilled information experience, are important for predicting the widening of the gender wage gap over the career.
Small-firm workers are almost three times as likely to become self-employed as large-firm workers, and the self-employed are twice as likely to transition into small versus large firms. What explains these unbalanced dynamics? Using Australian data (2001-19), we estimate a dynamic structural model that captures the role of human capital and its transferability across sectors, discovering one's sector-specific abilities, and nonpecuniary motivations. We find that the main drivers explaining the differential transitions into and out of self-employment from small firms are the favorable returns and transferability of large-firm experience and the higher switching costs associated with moving between small firms and self-employment.
We explore the returns to elite STEM education by examining the educational and labor market consequences of admission to Finland's most prestigious engineering school. Using data from centralized admissions, we estimate these effects by regression discontinuity design for marginally admitted elite school applicants who also applied to another engineering school. According to our results, elite school admission leads to an advantaged peer group and triples the probability of graduating from the elite school but does not improve the average early-career labor market outcomes. However, we find positive returns for students who originate from low-educated families. These returns are likely driven by strong effects on this group's exposure to the elite school's programs and surrounding labor market region.
We estimate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on hidden dropout, a new measure indicating failure in achieving the minimum level of skills considered to be adequate for a student getting a high school diploma. We compare two cohorts of students, one affected and the other unaffected by the pandemic, both in a cross-sectional and in a difference-in-differences specification. We find that hidden dropout increases for the exposed cohort by 6.5-8.7 percentage points. The effect is mainly driven by the transition into hidden dropout status, and it is stronger for students with lower prior achievement, from poorer families, and for immigrants.
By use of firm-level data that cover 25 European Union countries, the United Kingdom, and the United States as well as a difference-in-differences approach, we show that employers adopting advanced digital technologies (ADTs) reduce their investment in training per employee. Compared with the investment in training by non-adopting firms, this reduction is negligible on impact but increases to -11.3% and -13.8% of the pretreatment mean 2 and 3 years after adoption. We argue that a reason for the decline is that ADTs and employee training are substitutes in production. Our findings point to challenges in realizing high levels of firm-sponsored training for employees in increasingly digital economies.
This study compares entrepreneurs' and employees' tasks and explores the relationship between employees' opportunities to learn entrepreneurs' tasks and entrepreneurship. Analysis of comprehensive task information from 31 countries reveals that entrepreneurs perform more autonomous, diverse, financial, and managerial tasks and fewer compiling tasks than employees. Worker-level analysis across 23 countries shows that employees' greater learning opportunities for entrepreneurs' tasks-combining task variety and entrepreneur-like task content-increase entrepreneurship entry. Because entry increases for both high- and low-performance entrepreneurs, learning opportunities do not have significant effects on employment scale or innovativeness of entrepreneurs' businesses on average.
There is increasing interest in recruiting star scientists to catalyze clusters in targeted research areas. While star-arrival effects on incumbents' productivity are often positive, we know less about how the relatedness between incumbents' and stars' knowledge intermediates the size of these effects. Using Scopus data on publications and citations, we find that incumbent productivity is insensitive to a fixed measure of relatedness at the time of arrival but is positively affected when relatedness changes after arrival. This distinction between "being related" and "becoming related" to the star matters. Results are robust across alternative measures of relatedness, output, and time windows.
We investigate the entry and exit of short-cycle higher education programs (SCPs), which last two or three years and can address local skill needs. Exploiting administrative data from Colombia, we study markets defined by geographic location and field of study. We find that institutions open new programs in response to local labor market demand, competition, and costs. Within markets, they often close and open programs simultaneously, possibly due to capacity constraints. SCPs are more responsive to local labor market demand than bachelor’s programs; private and non-university SCP providers are the most responsive. These findings have implications for workforce development.
We aim to identify winners and losers of a sudden inflow of low-skilled immigrants using a general equilibrium search and matching model in which employees, either native or nonnative, are heterogeneous with respect to their skill level and produce different types of goods. We estimate the short-term impact of this shock for Italy in the period 2008-2017 to be sizeable and highly asymmetric. In 2017, the real wages of low-skilled and high-skilled employees were 8% lower and 4% higher, respectively, compared to a counter-factual scenario with no non-natives. Similarly, employers working in the low-skilled market experienced a drop in profits of comparable magnitude, while the opposite happened to employers operating in the high-skilled market. Finally, the presence of non-natives led to a 10% increase in GDP and to an increment of approximately 70 billions € in Government revenues and 18 billions € in social security contributions. We argue that these results help rationalise the recent surge of anti-immigrant sentiments among the low-income segment of the Italian population.
No AccessPolicy Research Working Papers3 Aug 2021Labor Market Effects of Short-Cycle Higher Education Programs: Challenges and Evidence from ColombiaAuthors/Editors: Maria Marta Ferreyra, Camila Galindo, Sergio UrzúaMaria Marta Ferreyra, Camila Galindo, Sergio Urzúahttps://doi.org/10.1596/1813-9450-9717SectionsAboutView ChaptersPDF (2.2 MB) ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In Abstract: This paper estimates the labor market effects of enrolling in a short-cycle program in Colombia. Following evidence for the U.S., increasing access to short-cycle degrees might attract some students who would not have enrolled in higher education otherwise (i.e., the expansion or democratization margin), while also inducing other students to divert from bachelor's- and into short-cycle- degrees (i.e., the diversion margin). To identify responses along these margins, this paper uses an Instrumental Variables strategy and exploits local variation in the supply of short-cycle programs for the universe of high school graduates in 2005. Having at least one higher education institution specialized in short-cycle degrees within a 10 km radius of the student's high school municipality increases enrollment in short-cycle programs by 3 percentage points, or 30 percent of the sample average. Results indicate that this enrollment increase is largely driven by students who would divert from bachelor's to short-cycle degrees due to changes in the local supply of short-cycle program. For these students, SCPs improve participation in the formal labor market among females, although they lead to lower monthly wages among males. Previous bookNext book FiguresreferencesRecommendeddetails View Published: June 2021 Copyright & Permissions KeywordsTERTIARY EDUCATIONHIGHER EDUCATIONLABOR SKILLSLABOR MARKET PDF DownloadLoading ...
Occupational segregation is one of the major causes of the gender pay gap. We probe the possibility that individual beliefs regarding gender stereotypes established in childhood contribute to gendered sorting. We consider whether UK students aged 15-16 years recommend that a fictitious peer pursue different college majors and career paths simply because of the peer's gender. We find strong evidence that this is the case. The within-majors treatment design shows that our respondents are 11 percentage points more likely to recommend corporate law to a male peer. The across-majors design reveals that students presented with a male fictitious peer tend to recommend degrees that have lower shares of females to males.
We study the consequences of expansion of funding for early-childhood education and of mandatory attendance of preschools in Brazil. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that attending preschool increases test scores at fifth grade of primary education by 26% (mathematics) and 29% (language) of a standard deviation. The heterogeneous effects reveal that students from disadvantaged backgrounds or from municipalities with greater education investment benefit more. Moreover, we do not find positive and statistically significant results for the effects of attending child care, except for students with less educated mothers.
An immigration shock has an ambiguous effect on inflation, because there are multiple channels working in both directions. Cross-country empirical evidence on Venezuelan immigration in Latin America points to a net disinflationary effect. We study immigration and inflation in a general equilibrium model with search frictions in the labor market, which we calibrate to Chile, an emerging country that has experienced substantial immigration in recent years. A net disinflationary effect is consistent with a labor supply channel dominating an aggregate demand channel. We also find that the systematic response of monetary policy is quantitatively important for the propagation of the shock.
We explore the effects of early-life income shocks on human capital using oil price fluctuations in a large sample of relevant African countries and employing microdata from multiple waves of the Demographic and Health Surveys. Such shocks enable human capital investment via the standard income effect but also crowd it out because of substitutability between natural resource and human capital income sources. The relative strength of the two effects depends on the age at which the shock is experienced. We find that income shocks in early life are associated with enhanced educational attainment and wealth but are sometimes linked to reduced levels of such outcomes if experienced in adolescence.
