Mentoring, Educational Services, and Incentives to Learn: What Do We Know About Them?

This paper reviews recent studies on the effectiveness of services and incentives offered to disadvantaged youth. We focus our analysis on three types of interventions: mentoring, educational services, and financial rewards. The objective of this article is threefold. First, we explain alternative theoretical points of view in favor (or against – when applicable) each of these interventions. Then, we discuss how recent empirical work has affected that view, and we summarize the latest findings. We conclude with a discussion on what questions remain to be examined. Our hope is that this article will serve as a resource for those seeking to understand what educational interventions work and for whom, and to use as a starting point to illuminate the debate on where to go next.cognitive and non-cognitive skills, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, at-risk youth, resilience, deviancy training, deterrence, primary- and high-school, post-secondary education, remedial programs, incentives on inputs and outputs

Unintended Effects of a Family-Friendly Law in a Segmented Labor Market

Family-friendly laws may backfire if not all workers with access to the policies use them. Because these policies are costly to the employer, hiring practices may consequently be affected at the detriment of the at-risk population who may end up accessing the policy. We exploit a 1999 Spanish law that granted all workers with children under 7 years the right to work part-time. Most importantly, the law declared a layoff invalid if the worker had previously asked for a work-week reduction due to family responsibilities. Using a difference-in-differences (DD) methodology, we first find evidence that the law increased part-time work among eligible mothers with a permanent contract, but had no effect on eligible fathers or mothers with a temporary contract. This effect is driven by the less-educated women. Then, using both a DD and a DDD approach, we analyze the effects of the law among the at-risk population, i.e., childbearing-aged women with no children under 7. We find that this policy led to the unintended effect of decreasing the likelihood of being employed with a permanent contract among the at-risk high-school graduate women (relative to their male counterpart), while increasing their relative likelihood of having a fixed-term contract job. These findings suggest that, after the law, employers preferred hiring childbearing-aged men under permanent contracts (offering fixed-term contracts to childbearing-aged women).temporary employment, flexible work arrangement laws, European unemployment

Immigrants' Assimilation Process in a Segmented Labor Market

While much of the literature on immigrants' assimilation has focused on countries with a large tradition of receiving immigrants and with flexible labor markets, very little is known on how immigrants adjust to other types of host economies. With its severe dual labor market, and an unprecedented immigration boom, Spain presents a perfect natural experiment to analyze immigrations' assimilation process. Using data from the 2000 to 2008 Spanish Labor Force Survey, we find that immigrants are more occupationally mobile than natives, and that much of this greater flexibility is explained by immigrants' assimilation process soon after arrival. However, we find little evidence of convergence, especially among women and high skilled immigrants. This suggests that instead of integrating, immigrants are occupationally segregating, implying that there is both imperfect substitutability and underutilization of immigrants' human capital.immigrants' assimilation effects, cohort effects, occupational distributions and mobility, segmented labor markets

Child Care, Maternal Employment and Persistence: A Natural Experiment from Spain

Reconciling work and family is high on many governments' agenda, especially in countries, such as Spain, with record-low fertility and female labor force participation rates. This paper analyzes the effects of a large-scale provision of publicly subsidized child care in Spain in the early 1990s, addressing the impact on mothers’ short- and long-run employment outcomes (up to four years after the child was eligible to participate in the program). Exploiting the staggered timing and age-targeting of this child-care expansion, our estimates show that the policy led to a sizable increase in employment (8%), and hours worked (9%) of mothers with age-eligible (3-year-old) children, and that these effects persisted over time. Heterogeneity matters. While persistence is strong among mothers with a high-school degree, the effects of the program on maternal employment quickly fade away among those without a high-school degree. These findings are consistent with the program reducing the depreciation of human capital. The lack of any results among college educated mothers, which represent less than one tenth of mothers, is most likely due to the fact that they are able to pay day care (even when it is mainly privately supplied), and that most of them are already strongly attached to the labor force.quasi-natural experiment, childcare, preschool children, mother's labor supply, differences-in-differences-in-differences

The Part-Time Pay Penalty in a Segmented Labor Market

While much of the literature that investigates the part-time (PT) / full-time (FT) hourly wage differential and its causes focuses on average effects, very few studies analyze the heterogeneous effects of PT work across different subgroups, despite the policy relevance of understanding channels behind the (raw) PT penalty in different labor markets. This paper is the first to examine the implications of switching to PT work for women's subsequent earnings trajectories, distinguishing by their type of contract: permanent or fixed-term. Using a 21-year unbalanced Social Security records panel of over 76,000 prime-aged women strongly attached to the Spanish labor market, we find that PT work aggravates the segmentation of the labor market insofar there is a PT pay penalty and this penalty is larger and more persistent in the case of women with fixed-term contracts. The paper discusses problems arising in empirical estimation, and how to address them. It concludes with policy implications relevant for Continental Europe and its dual structure of employment protection.fixed-term and permanent contract, hourly wage levels and growth, prime-aged women, fixed-effects estimator, differential measurement error of HS variable, underlying channels

Child care, maternal employment and persistence: A natural experiment from Spain

Reconciling work and family is high on many governments' agenda, especially in countries, such as Spain, with record-low fertility and female labor force participation rates. This paper analyzes the effects of a large-scale provision of publicly subsidized child care in Spain in the early 1990s, addressing the impact on mothers' short- and long-run employment outcomes (up to four years after the child was eligible to participate in the program). Exploiting the staggered timing and age-targeting of this child-care expansion, our estimates show that the policy led to a sizable increase in employment (8%), and hours worked (9%) of mothers with age-eligible (3-year-old) children, and that these effects persisted over time. Heterogeneity matters. While persistence is strong among mothers with a high-school degree, the effects of the program on maternal employment quickly fade away among those without a high-school degree. These findings are consistent with the program reducing the depreciation of human capital. The lack of any results among college educated mothers, which represent less than one tenth of mothers, is most likely due to the fact that they are able to pay day care (even when it is mainly privately supplied), and that most of them are already strongly attached to the labor force

Chutes and Ladders: Dual Tracks and the Motherhood Dip

Using rich panel data recently available from Spanish Social Security records, we find that a negative motherhood earnings differential of 2.3 log points remains even after controlling for both individual- and firm-level unobserved heterogeneity. The analysis of the mothers and childless women's earnings trajectories over time reveals that "mothers to be" experience important earnings increases (of up to 6 log points) several years prior to giving birth to their first child. However, this earnings' advantage gets seriously hit right after birth, and it is not until nine years later that mothers' earnings return to their pre-birth (relative) levels. The study finds that heterogeneity matters as most of the motherhood penalty and earnings' dip is driven by mothers working in the primary labor market (with permanent contracts). For these women, much of the earnings losses occur because mothers change employers to work part-time, or (if they stay with their former employer) they take leave of absence. An instrumental variable approach is used to address concerns of selection into type of contract. We exploit variation in the amount, timing and profiling of subsidies offered to firms when hiring permanent workers, a policy that started to be implemented in Spain in 1997.earnings trajectories, individual- and firm-level fixed-effects estimator, permanent and fixed-term contracts, underlying channels

Part-time work, fixed-term contracts, and the returns to experience

Using data from Spanish Social Security records, we investigate the returns to experience in different flexible work arrangements, including part-time and full-time work, and permanent and fixed-term contracts. We use a trivariate random effects model which consists of a three-equation system that is estimated simultaneously by Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques. Our results indicate that there is a large pay gap for working part-time which persists many years after having resumed full-time work. We also find that working part-time involves lower returns to experience than standard full-time employment and thus a substantial negative wage differential for those employed part-time accumulates over time. Finally, we find that heterogeneity exist by contract type and motherhood status

The Wage Effects of Fixed-term Contract Employment Revisited: an Investigation Based on Social Security Records

Using data from social security records on Spanish males, we investigate the wage effects of working under a fixed-term contract. In a first step, we provide fixed-effects estimates of the wage effect of working under a fixed-term contract for low-skilled, medium-skilled, and high-skilled men based on administrative data. Next, we include the individual s work history into the wage equation to obtain wage effects conditional on the work history and to study the returns to experience under fixed-term contracts. For this analysis we employ a three-equation random effects model estimated by Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. Finally, we use the estimates of this model to simulate the long-term effects of working under a fixed-term contract on future career outcomes

Unintended effects of a family-friendly law in a segmented labor market

Family-friendly laws may backfire if not all workers with access to the policies use them. Because these policies are costly to the employer, hiring practices may consequently be affected at the detriment of the at-risk population who may end up accessing the policy. We exploit a 1999 Spanish law that granted all workers with children under 7 years the right to work part-time. Most importantly, the law declared a layoff invalid if the worker had previously asked for a work-week reduction due to family responsibilities. Using a difference-in-differences (DD) methodology, we first find evidence that the law increased part-time work among eligible mothers with a permanent contract, but had no effect on eligible fathers or mothers with a temporary contract. This effect is driven by the less-educated women. Then, using both a DD and a DDD approach, we analyze the effects of the law among the at-risk population, i.e., childbearing-aged women with no children under 7. We find that this policy led to the unintended effect of decreasing the likelihood of being employed with a permanent contract among the at-risk high-school graduate women (relative to their male counterpart), while increasing their relative likelihood of having a fixed-term contract job. These findings suggest that, after the law, employers preferred hiring childbearing-aged men under permanent contracts (offering fixed-term contracts to childbearing-aged women)