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The purpose of this paper is to understand the value of foreign work experience for young migrants after their return to the home country labour market and their labour market preferences relative to stayers.

The authors analyse the labour market integration patterns of young return migrants in Slovakia. After reconstructing the life histories of young people from online CVs, a set of regression models investigates the attractiveness, salary expectations and positions of interest to returnees in comparison to stayers.

Post-accession foreign work experience increases the attractiveness of job candidates. Foreign work experience changes the expectations of returnees with respect to wages and widens their perspective on the location of future work. In the underperforming labour market, migration experience signals to employers a set of skills that differentiate young returnees from young stayers in a positive way.

While the web data are not representative, it allows the authors to study return migration from a perspective that large representative data sets do not allow.

Foreign work experience is, in general, an asset for (re)integration into the home labour market, but the higher salary demands of returnees might hinder the process in a less-skilled segment of the labour market.

Return migration is a relatively underresearched area, and knowledge about the perception of returnees among employers and the labour market preferences of returnees is relatively limited. Another contribution lies in the use of online data to analyse return migration from the perspective of both labour demand and supply.

There is ample evidence that financial market development leads to economic growth. If improving labor rights can be shown to positively influence equity markets, then that, in turn, will lead to economic growth. The finance literature has examined the impact of a broader metric, namely, the Economic Freedom Index, on equity returns worldwide, and the evidence is mixed. This study focuses on one dimension of economic freedom: labor rights. Specifically, the study analyzes the impact of labor rights on national equity market indexes using the Labor Rights Index developed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Fraser Institute (FI). Using panel regression analysis for 49 countries (for the OECD Index) and 76 countries (for the FI Index) over the period 1985–2014, the study finds that changes in labor rights have a statistically significant positive impact on equity returns, after controlling for business-cycle effects and time-fixed effects. The study also finds significant differences in the labor–rights–equity returns relationship between developed and less developed economies.

This paper examines perceived labor market earnings among adolescents and their parents by gender and caste. Previous research has established that lower subjective expectations of labor market returns among parents affect educational investment. Likewise, subjective expectations of adolescents about labor market returns are likely to affect their commitment to their education. In the labor market, gender and caste biases manifest itself in terms of lower wages for women and persons from marginalized communities. The authors ask if perceived earnings among adolescents and their parents vary by caste and gender over and above their intrinsic ability.

The authors use a unique dataset on adolescents that has been recently collected (2013-2015) by ASER Centre, the research and assessment wing of Pratham Education Foundation for the analysis. To answer the research question posed in the paper, they use standard OLS and quantile regression techniques.

Results confirm that girls have lower expected earnings than boys. Caste differences appear more rigid in Bihar.

The authors recognize that the results presented do not take into consideration the issue of selection bias. Hence, they are applicable not to the average adolescents in the study districts, but only to those who reported expected earnings. That said, they do not think that this technical limitation dilutes the broad policy conclusions emerging from the study.

The paper uses cognition as a measure of an adolescent’s intrinsic ability. Therein lays the uniqueness of the paper. It brings into the discussion on expected earnings test scores as a measure of an adolescent’s cognitive ability. It is also unique in that it focuses on adolescents in the age group of 11-16 years who are likely to join the labor force in few years. Previous discussion of subjective expectations in India did not include any measure to capture cognitive ability and did not focus exclusively on adolescents.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate self-competence—the ability to act responsibly on one's own—and likely nonlinear wage returns across different levels of self-competence as part of training curricula.

The authors identify the teaching of self-competence at the occupational level by applying machine-learning methods to the texts of occupational training curricula. Defining three levels of self-competence (high, medium, and low) and using individual labor market data, the authors examine nonlinearities in wage returns to different levels of self-competence.

The authors find nonlinear returns to teaching self-competence: a medium level of self-competence taught in an occupation has the largest wage returns compared to low or high levels. However, in occupations with a high cognitive requirement profile, a high level of self-competence generates positive wage returns.

This paper first adds to research on the importance of teaching noncognitive skills for economic outcomes, which recently—in addition to personality traits research—has primarily focused on social skills by introducing self-competence as another largely unexplored but important noncognitive skill. Second, the paper studies not only average but also nonlinear wage returns, showing that the right level of self-competence is crucial, i.e. neither teaching too little nor too much self-competence provides favorable returns because of trade-offs with other skills (e.g. technical or professional skills). Third, the paper also examines complementarities between cognitive skills and noncognitive skills, again pointing toward nonlinear returns, i.e. only in occupations with a high cognitive requirement profile, high levels of self-competence generate positive wage returns.

Indian government initiated several skill development policies and different types of vocational education and training (VET). Yet the participation in skill education is low because of poor labour market outcomes. This paper aims to calculate returns to skill education to understand the type of training that will have better labour market outcomes.

In this paper nationally representative data from the periodic labour force survey (PLFS), collected by the national sample survey office for 2017–2018, are used to estimate the returns to formal and non-formal VET obtained (after different levels of general education) with the help of Heckman's two-stage method.

Nearly 8% of the working-age population has received some form of VET (mostly non-formal), generating poor returns. For the overall population, formal on-job training (OJT) and full-time VET influence wage positively and significantly. Full-time VET obtained after secondary and below levels of education generates positive returns, whereas part-time VET is profitable only to those without formal education. At the graduate level, technical education obtained along with VET is associated with better wages.

In India where a considerable proportion of the workforce is employed in the informal sector, different types of skill training like full-time, part-time and OJT influence labour market outcomes. This finding has policy implication for countries with large informal sector and calls for further research in such countries.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relative employment levels of return migrants in Finland with regard to their re‐adaptation into the labour market.

Longitudinal census data distinguished Finns who had lived abroad and returned to Finland. These return migrants are compared with non‐migrants with regard to employment levels, using logistic regression models that account for sex, age, education, mother tongue and place of residence.

Both male and female return migrants have odds of employment that are only about half those of their non‐migrant counterparts. The employment differential is stable over time and, consequently, not particularly sensitive to changes in the macroeconomic environment. Relative employment rates of migrants with short periods abroad and long periods in the home country are somewhat higher than those of other migrants, but still lower than those of non‐migrants. Difficulties in readapting into Finnish society are consequently associated with personal characteristics that cannot be observed explicitly but are apparently associated with job‐finding probability.

Considering that Finland at present has no explicit measures directed towards return migrants, it is suggested that this group should be given more policy attention.

The paper provides quantitative evidence that Finnish migrants have substantial difficulties in finding employment in the home country labour market subsequent to return migration, and that these problems cannot be attributed to structural factors.

The educational and labor market outcomes of the first, first-and-a-half (1.5), second, and third generations of immigrants to the United States (US) and Canada are compared. These countries’ immigration policies have diverged on important dimensions since the 1960s, resulting in large differences in immigrant source country distributions and a much larger emphasis on skill requirements in Canada, making for interesting comparisons. Of particular note is the educational attainment of US immigrants which is currently lower than that in Canada and is expected to influence future second generations causing an existing education gap to grow. This will likely in turn influence earnings where, controlling only for age, the current US second generation has earnings comparable to those of the third generation, whereas the Canadian second generation has higher earnings. Importantly, the role of, and returns to, observable characteristics are significantly different between the US and Canada. Observable characteristics explain little of the difference in earnings outcomes across generations in the US but have remarkable explanatory power in Canada. Controlling for a wide array of characteristics, especially education, has little effect on the US second generation's earnings premium, but causes the Canadian premium to become negative relative to the Canadian third generation. The Canadian 1.5 and second generations’ educational advantage is of benefit in the labor market, but does not receive the same rate of return as it does for the third generation causing a very sizable gap between the current good observed outcomes, and the even better outcomes that would be expected if the 1.5 and second generation received the same rate of return to their characteristics as the third generation. Why the US differs likely follows from a combination of its lower immigration rate, its different selection mechanism, and its settlement policies and practices.

This paper aims to determine the characteristics of board certification among US physicians and to test whether accounting for the expected gains to certification alters the pattern of the determinants of board certification.

Splitting the sample into sub‐samples by characteristics associated with certification/non‐certification identified in a probit, the incremental gain to certification from log‐earnings equations is identified. Realizing that these methods are susceptible to sample selection, correction is made for it using the Heckman approach. Using the sample selection corrected equations, the expected gain to certification among those who certify is then predicted and those who do not certify is then predicted and this difference is included as a proxy for the expected gain in the original probit to ascertain whether including the expected gain alters the determinants of certification.

Accounting for the expected gain alters the pattern of the determinants of certification. Although some groups such as blacks appear less likely to certify, after accounting for their expected return to certification, they are not as less likely. This is explained in terms of the expected marginal return to certification, market structure and practice setting.

The data used in the analysis apply only to young physicians in the USA. Also, these results may be applicable only to the particular cohort used in this analysis.

The findings help to explain the absence of minority board certified physicians within the USA.

This paper is the first to simultaneously estimate the returns to physician board certification and the decision to obtain certification.