Search results

Advanced education is often thought to respond to the demands of the economy, market forces create new occupations, and then universities respond with new degrees and curricula aimed at training future workers with specific new skills. Presented here is comparative research on an underappreciated, yet growing, concurrent alternative process: universities, with their global growth in numbers and enrollments, in concert with expanding research capacity, create and privilege knowledge and skills, legitimate new degrees that then become monetized and even required in private and public sectors of economies. A process referred to as academization of occupations has far-reaching implications for understanding the transformation of capitalism, new dimensions of social inequality, and resulting stratification among occupations. Academization is also eclipsing the more limited professionalization processes in occupations. Additionally, it fuels further expansion of advanced education and contributes to a new culture of work in the 21st century. Commissioned detailed German and US case studies of the university origins and influence on workplace consequences of seven selected occupations and associated knowledge, skills, and degrees investigate the academization process. And to demonstrate how universal this could become, the cases contrast the more open and less-restrictive education and occupation system in the US with the centralized and state-controlled education system in Germany. With expected variation, both economies and their occupational systems show evidence of robust academization. Importantly too is evidence of academic transformations of understandings about approaches to job tasks and use of authoritative knowledge in occupational activities.

This paper aims to explore the design of management teams when the critical task facing individual managers is monitoring the performance of worker teams and producing performance measures under uncertain information environments.

The authors use a multi-agent LEN framework – linear contract, exponential utility and normal density – to model the incentive provision and organizational design.

The main lesson is that the use of performance measures under uncertainty is greatly affected by the potential for free-riding in the very monitoring activities which generate the measures to begin with. Accordingly, the value of having a management team, that is the incremental benefit of having a second manager, depends on the monitoring technology. Of particular importance are the potential free-riding in monitoring effort among multiple managers and synergies gained from having more than one manager, such as correlation among the performance measures produced or improvement due to splitting workers pool into separate groups for each manager to monitor separately.

The paper pushes this line of research further by explicitly modeling the endogenous process of signal generation within a rich economic environment. In this environment, number of workers being evaluated and number of managers who produce the signals are both endogenous. Furthermore, both workers and managers are subject to moral hazard problem. In particular, the managers suffer from potential free-riding problems but may benefit from synergistic forces due to team monitoring.

In large parts of the world, income inequality has been rising in recent decades. Other regions have experienced declining trends in income inequality. This raises the question of which mechanisms underlie contrasting observed trends in income inequality around the globe. To address this research question in an empirical analysis at the aggregate level, we examine a global sample of 73 countries between 1981 and 2010, studying a broad set of drivers to investigate their interaction and influence on income inequality. Within this broad approach, we are interested in the heterogeneity of income inequality determinants across world regions and along the income distribution. Our findings indicate the existence of a small set of systematic drivers across the global sample of countries. Declining labour income shares and increasing imports from high-income countries significantly contribute to increasing income inequality, while taxation and imports from low-income countries exert countervailing effects. Our study reveals the region-specific impacts of technological change, financial globalisation, domestic financial deepening and public social spending. Most importantly, we do not find systematic evidence of education’s equalising effect across high- and low-income countries. Our results are largely robust to changing the underlying sources of income Ginis, but looking at different segments of income distribution reveals heterogeneous effects.

This paper investigates the potential wage impacts of a shift to more environmentally sustainable production patterns.

The empirical analysis is carried out using labour force survey data and interval regressions.

Estimates at the individual level suggest that small wage differentials exist: individuals employed in green industries earn about seven per cent more than those working in non-green industries.

To date, very little is known about the characteristics of jobs in the green industry and by extension, the labour force effects that can emerge or change as a result of transitioning towards a greener economy. While exploratory in nature, this analysis seeks to shed light on an underdeveloped area of research, namely, wage inequalities associated with transitioning towards green growth.

Research shows that parental employment and education status affect the amount of parental childcare time, which is a fundamental determinant of children's outcomes. In this paper, the authors study whether being overeducated – working in a job that requires less education than the level of education acquired – is related to the time parents devote to their children.

The authors set two main hypotheses. First, overeducation might lead to more childcare time if being overeducated is the result of the individual prioritizing family over career. Second, overeducation might lead to less childcare time if overeducation is the result of lower ability. The authors estimate time use equations using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) from 2004 to 2019.

The authors find that overeducated parents devote less time to childcare than matched parents, especially in the weekend sample. The authors’ results suggest that overeducation is not a deliberate choice prioritizing family over career.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study on the implications of being overeducated on childcare.

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a discrete choice experiment (DCE) on the competencies of potential information technology (IT)-retrainees. The results give insights in the monetary value and relative returns to both soft and hard skills.

The authors apply a DCE in which the authors propose seven pairs of hypothetical candidates to employers based in the municipality of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. These hypothetical candidates differ on six observable skill attributes and have different starting wages. The authors use the inference from the DCE to calculate the marginal rates of substitution (MRS). The MRS gives an indication of the monetary value of each skill attribute.

Employers prefer a candidate who possesses a degree in an exact field over a similar candidate from another discipline. Programming experience from previous jobs is the most highly valued characteristic for an IT-retrainee. Employers would pay a candidate with basic programming experience a 53 percent higher starting wage. The most high-valued soft skill is listening skills, for which employers are willing to pay a 46 percent higher wage. The results of this paper show that both hard and soft skills are important, but not all soft skills are equally important.

The results on the returns to skills provide guidelines to tailor IT training and retraining programs to the needs of the business environment. A key strength of this paper is that the authors have information on the preference orderings for different skills and kinds of experience.