Educational mismatch, wages, and wage growth: Overeducation in Sweden, 1974-2000

We examine the impact of educational mismatch on wages and wage growth in Sweden. The empirical analyses, based on cross-sectional and panel data from the Level of living surveys 1974-2000, are guided by two main hypotheses: (a) that educational mismatch reflects human capital compensation rather than real mismatch, and (b) that educational mismatch is real but dissolves with time spent in the labour market, so that its impact on wages tends toward zero over a typical worker’s career. Our findings do not support these hypotheses. First, significant differences in contemporaneous economic returns to education across match categories remain even after variations in ability are taken into account. Second, we find no evidence that the rate of wage growth is higher among overeducated workers than others. Our conclusion is that the overeducated are penalized early on by an inferior rate of return to schooling from which they do not recover.Educational mismatch; overeducation; wages

Nurses' perceptions of aids and obstacles to the provision of optimal end of life care in ICU

Contains fulltext : 172380.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access

Training Systems and Labor Mobility

The impact of general and specific training on income and mobility is an important issue for the discussion around human capital as well as the design of educational systems. Using data from two retrospective life-history surveys this paper examines the impact of more general school-based vocational training (Sweden) and more specific apprenticeship training (Germany) on inter-firm, inter-occupational, and inter-industrial mobility. The results show that workers with a school-based vocational degree move more frequently between occupations, while no difference in firm and industrial mobility can be discerned

Importing skills : Migration policy, generic skills and earnings among immigrants in Australasia, Europe and North America

One approach to meet a perceived increased demand for highly skilled workers has been to use migration policy, providing work permits and visas to highly skilled foreign workers. Our knowledge of how differences in migration policy are related to the skills of migrant populations is however fairly limited, being restricted largely to education. In contrast, we know little about how actual skills of immigrants compare to those of natives, how migrant skills differ according to migration policy, and how this is related to the labour market integration of immigrants. The purpose of this study is to explore these issues focusing on a specific set of generic skills, so-called ‘literacy skills’. Rather than only literacy in the form of reading and mathematical skills, the measure used also captures complex reasoning and problem-solving abilities and should therefore be seen as a measure of broad generic skills. Using data from the International Adult Literacy Survey, nine countries representing a wide range of migration policies are examined; Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the USA. The analyses seriously question the belief that stricter selection of immigrants will produce a pool of skilled immigrants, simplify their economic integration and boost national economies. Given the emphasis placed on migrant selection, it is for instance surprising that immigrants in Canada and New Zealand do not perform better. Furthermore, immigrants in Canada and New Zealand do not integrate better than other migrants. Similar results are thus obtained for other countries, with drastically different migration policies. Instead, these results imply that there are many ways to attract highly skilled immigrants and paths to successfully integration

Effects of Manpower Policies on Duration Dependence in Re-employment Rates: The Example of Sweden.

In contrast to the evidence from other countries, Swedish studies of the transition from unemployment to employment have consistently reported a nonnegative duration dependence in the hazard. This study examines the extent to which this results from large scale labor market programs, a limited duration of unemployment benefits, or differences among available jobs. The labor market programs are here found to be the primary factor behind the earlier Swedish results. The programs thus pick up those with the worst employment prospects, thereby postponing a decrease in the reemployment probability among job searchers. This in turn generates an on 'average' constant duration dependence. Copyright 1995 by The London School of Economics and Political Science.