Higher education and unemployment in Europe : an analysis of the academic subject and national effects

This paper examines the impact of an academic degree and field of study on short and long-term unemployment across Europe (EU15). Labour Force Survey (LFS) data on over half a million individuals are utilised for that purpose. The harmonized LFS classification of level of education and field of study overcomes past problems of comparability across Europe. The study analyses (i) the effect of an academic degree at a European level, (ii) the specific effect of 14 academic subjects and (iii) country specific effects. The results indicate that an academic degree is more effective on reducing the likelihood of short-term than long-term unemployment. This general pattern even though it is observed for most of the academic subjects its levels show significant variation across disciplines and countries

The longitudinal relationship between job mobility, perceived organizational justice, and health

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The main purpose of the present study was to examine the 2-year longitudinal and reciprocal relationship between job mobility and health and burnout. A second aim was to elucidate the effects of perceived organizational justice and turnover intentions on the relationship between job mobility (non-, internally and externally mobile), and health (SF-36) and burnout (CBI).</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The study used questionnaire data from 662 Swedish civil servants and the data were analysed with Structural Equation Modeling statistical methods.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The results showed that job mobility was a better predictor of health and burnout, than health and burnout were as predictors of job mobility. The predictive effects were most obvious for psychosocial health and burnout, but negligible as far as physical health was concerned. Organizational justice was found to have a direct impact on health, but not on job mobility; whereas turnover intentions had a direct effect on job mobility.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The predictive relationship between job mobility and health has practical implications for health promotive actions in different organizations.</p

Youth unemployment and active labor market policies in Europe

Since the economic crisis in 2008, European youth unemployment rates have been persistently high at around 20% on average. The majority of European countries spends significant resources each year on active labor market programs (ALMP) with the aim of improving the integration prospects of struggling youths. Among the most common programs used are training courses, job search assistance and monitoring, subsidized employment, and public work programs. For policy makers, it is of upmost importance to know which of these programs work and which are able to achieve the intended goals – may it be the integration into the first labor market or further education. Based on a detailed assessment of the particularities of the youth labor market situation, we discuss the pros and cons of different ALMP types. We then provide a comprehensive survey of the recent evidence on the effectiveness of these ALMP for youth in Europe, highlighting factors that seem to promote or impede their effectiveness in practice. Overall, the findings with respect to employment outcomes are only partly promising. While job search assistance (with and without monitoring) results in overwhelmingly positive effects, we find more mixed effects for training and wage subsidies, whereas the effects for public work programs are clearly negative. The evidence on the impact of ALMP on furthering education participation as well as employment quality is scarce, requiring additional research and allowing only limited conclusions so far

Recalls and unemployment insurance taxes

The US unemployment insurance (UI) system draws its funds from a payroll tax on employers. The tax rate varies directly with an employer's layoff history. There exists extensive evidence on the effect of this so-called experience rated tax on layoff decisions. However, since firms are typically liable for each dollar of regular UI benefits paid to laid off former employees, experience rating may also affect recall behaviour. This note therefore measures the effect of the UI financing system on the duration of unemployment. This article finds some evidence that higher layoff tax costs shorten the duration of recall unemployment.

Two aspects of labor mobility: a bivariate Poisson regression approach

The study introduces a distinction between two types of labor mobility: direct job to job changes (which are assumed to be voluntary) and job changes after experiencing an unemployment spell (assumed to be involuntary). Exploiting the close relationship between those two phenomena we adopt a bivariate regression framework for our empirical analysis of data on male individuals in the German labor market. To account for the non-negative and discrete nature of the two counts of job changes in a ten year interval a new econometric model is proposed: the bivariate Poisson regression proves to be superior to the univariate specification. Further, the empirical content of distinguishing between two types of mobility is subject to a test, and, in fact, supported by the data: The hypothesis that both measures are observationally equivalent can be rejected

Structural aspects of the labor markets of five OECD countries

The simplest equilibrium search models depend on a few parameters that determine the joint distribution of unemployment spells, job spells, and wages. In this study we use aggregate data to estimate these key parameters for five OECD countries: (West-)Germany, The Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom and the USA. We show that in the simple model only information on the marginal distribution of wages and the marginal distributions of unemployment and job spells is needed to estimate the structural parameters. Thus, the methodological contribution of this paper is the demonstration that the model can be calibrated from readily available aggregate data, and that panel data on individuals are not necessary. Our estimation method provides a direct link between types of information and parameters. We show that data on job durations allow us to estimate an index of the search frictions, without the need to estimate the other parameters simultaneously. The parameters, the arrival rate of wage offers, the rate of job destruction, the average productivity of jobs, and the variation of job productivities are of interest in their own right. We also use the parameter estimates to obtain estimates of structuralunemployment due to wage floors, of the average level of monopsony power in the economy, and to make a decomposition of wage variation into variation due to productive differences between jobs and variation due to search frictions