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Economists and sociologists have proposed arguments for why there can exist wage penalties for work involving helping and caring for others, penalties borne disproportionately by women. Evidence on wage penalties is neither abundant nor compelling. We examine wage differentials associated with caring jobs using multiple years of Current Population Survey (CPS) earnings files matched to O*NET job descriptors that provide continuous measures of “assisting & caring” and “concern” for others across all occupations. This approach differs from prior studies that assume occupations either do or do not require a high level of caring. Cross-section and longitudinal analyses are used to examine wage differences associated with the level of caring, conditioned on worker, location, and job attributes. Wage level estimates suggest substantive caring penalties, particularly among men. Longitudinal estimates based on wage changes among job switchers indicate smaller wage penalties, our preferred estimate being a 2% wage penalty resulting from a one standard deviation increase in our caring index. We find little difference in caring wage gaps across the earnings distribution. Measuring mean levels of caring across the U.S. labor market over nearly thirty years, we find a steady upward trend, but overall changes are small and there is no evidence of convergence between women and men.

The purpose of this article is to evaluate a method for measuring work activities and skill requirements of 160 occupations in eight countries, used in EurOccupations, an EU‐FP6 project. Additionally, it aims to explore how the internet can be used for measuring work activities and skill requirements.

For the 160 occupations, work activities were described in approximately ten tasks. Occupational experts and jobholders were invited to rate these tasks and to indicate the skill requirements, using a multilingual web‐survey. Experts were recruited through the networks of the project partners and jobholders through frequently visited websites in the eight countries. The effectiveness of the drafting of tasks descriptions, the recruitment of raters, and the measurement of skill requirements is evaluated.

The project showed that tasks descriptions for a wide range of occupations and countries can be drafted relatively easy, using desk research. Conducting a web‐survey with a routing for 160 occupations and eight countries is viable. Recruiting experts used more resources than recruiting jobholders using the internet. Measuring skill requirements would need much more resources due to major variations within and across countries.

The article addresses a number of areas that are potentially worthy of further empirical investigations for a Europe‐wide library of occupational titles, work activities and skill requirements.

The paper outlines the potential of a future method for a European library of work activities and skill requirements for occupational titles, thereby facilitating European industrial training efforts.

Insight in the work activities and skill requirements of occupations will facilitate labour mobility and related training across EU member states.

This paper explores the potential for a Europe‐wide empirical underpinning of work activities and skill requirements, using a web‐survey and the internet.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate linkages in US labor market between importance of specific skills, education, or training requirements, and private average salary for occupations not characterized as requiring a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Data set constructed that matches 474 less than bachelor’s occupations to private average salary, education, or training requirements category, and 35 specific skills. Statistical and regression analysis has been done to assess linkages between these variables.

Highest returns associated with cognitive skills, quantitative skills, and other core academic basic skills set followed by traditional blue-collar technical skills. Interpersonal skills and related social skills set exhibited weak, and sometimes negative, association with private average salary by occupation.

Study of only US labor market at single point of time, findings may not generalize to either non US markets or occupations requiring bachelor’s degree or higher.

Workers in the less than bachelor’s labor market have greater upside salary potential if they obtain postsecondary certificates or associates’ degrees and target occupations placing a greater importance on cognitive skills, quantitative skills, and core academic basic skills than if they target traditional blue-collar technical skill occupations.

Social policies to enhance earnings for workers lacking bachelor’s degrees must target improving core generic transferable academic skills as well as vocationally specific training.

This if the first study that links these many specific skills to salary variation across less than bachelor’s occupations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the substantial expansion in the labour force between 1997 and 2004 on the proportion of the Irish workforce that can be categorised as working in knowledge occupations.

The Quarterly National Household Survey was used to estimate the trend in knowledge type work at the national level for the period 1997 to 2004, specifically examining which specific occupations are increasing over this period.

Employment growth occurred relatively equally at the high‐, middle‐ and low‐skill occupational levels, indicating the continuing importance of intermediate and particularly low‐skill occupations in the structure and expansion of the Irish labour force.

There are substantial problems with the use of broad occupational level data as a proxy to measure the extent of knowledge occupations. It would be useful to consider adopting the Australian Standard Classification of Occupations as it includes the complexity of the set of tasks involved in a job, formal education, training and previous experience.

The findings indicate the continuing importance of intermediate and low‐skill occupations as well as high‐skill occupations in the structure and expansion of the Irish labour force. Government training and education policy needs to target resources across a broad range of skills and occupations.

The paper provides a profile and analysis of occupational changes in the Irish labour market.

The purpose of this paper is to overcome the problems that skill mismatch cannot be measured directly and that demand side data are lacking. It relates demand and supply side characteristics by aggregating data from jobs ads and jobholders into occupations. For these occupations skill mismatch is investigated by focussing on demand and supply ratios, attained vis-à-vis required skills and vacancies’ skill requirements in relation to the demand-supply ratios.

Vacancy data from the EURES job portal and jobholder data from WageIndicator web-survey were aggregated by ISCO 4-digit occupations and merged in a database with 279 occupations for Czech Republic, being the only European country with disaggregated occupational data, coded educational data, and sufficient numbers of observations.

One fourth of occupations are in excessive demand and one third in excessive supply. The workforce is overeducated compared to the vacancies’ requirements. A high demand correlates with lower educational requirements. At lower occupational skill levels requirements are more condensed, but attainments less so. At higher skill levels, requirements are less condensed, but attainments more so. Educational requirements are lower for high demand occupations.

Using educational levels is a limited proxy for multidimensional skills. Higher educated jobholders are overrepresented.

In Europe labour market mismatches worry policy makers and Public Employment Services alike.

The authors study is the first for Europe to explore such a granulated approach of skill mismatch.

The primary purpose of this paper is to highlight the utility of operationalising the concept of skill ecosystems, or more accurately “intermediate occupational skill ecosystems”.

This paper draws on the process and findings of an empirical study of intermediate occupations in Scotland which set out to explore changing systems of initial skill creation and related problems of skill by embedding these systems within the broader canvas of skill ecosystems.

Operationalising skill ecosystems not only provided a framework from which to explore and provide an explanation of changing initial systems of skill creation but also supported broader conjectures on the nature of developments and problems within intermediate occupations.

The operationalisation presented has relevance to policy makers and academics beyond the scope of this particular examination of intermediate occupations. For policy makers, it emphasises that better skills utilisation cannot be reduced to the level of the individual; that the supply, demand, development and deployment of skills are interrelated and not discrete; and that the roles and relative influences of actors in a position to help build and sustain better skill ecosystems are changing. For academics concerned with exploring changing systems of skill creation, this, or some similar, operationalisation, has potential practical application in terms of supporting key stages in the research process.

This paper's value centres around the proposition, and illustration, that it is possible to effectively utilise a simple operationalisation of the inherently “messy” concept of skill ecosystems without losing the essence and complexity of the relations and dynamics embodied in the concept.

The purpose of this paper is to break down south-north migration along both the skill and the occupational dimension and thus to distinguish and compare several types of south-north migration and brain drain.

This paper presents south-north migration rates by occupational category at two distinct levels of disaggregation according to International Standard Classification of Occupations 1988 (ISCO-88). The data sets combine information about the labor market outcomes of immigrants in Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) countries around the year 2000 provided by the Database on Immigrants in OECD Countries by the OECD with employment data for the developing migrant-sending countries from the International Labour Organization.

The incidence of south-north migration was highest among Professionals, one of the two occupational categories generally requiring tertiary education, and among clerks and legislators, senior officials and managers. At the more disaggregated level, physical, mathematical and engineering science (associate) professionals, life science and health (associate) professionals, as well as other (associate) professionals exhibited significantly larger brain drain rates than teaching (associate) professionals. The data also suggest non-negligible occupation-education mismatches due to the imperfect transferability of skills acquired through formal education because south-north migrants with a university degree worked more often in occupational categories requiring less than tertiary education compared to OECD natives. The employment shares of most types of professionals and technicians and associate professionals, as well as of clerks and corporate managers were significantly smaller in the migrant-sending countries compared to the receiving countries.

The constructed data sets constitute the first comprehensive data sets on south-north migration by ISCO-88 major and sub-major occupational category for cross-sections of, respectively, 91 and 17 developing countries of emigration.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the impact of industry and occupation skills on the wages of displaced workers due to firm closure.

Using linked employer-employee data on displaced workers, this paper estimates the impact of industry and occupation tenure on post-displacement wage changes correcting for endogeneity with a multinomial logit model.

The evidence suggests that occupation has more specific skill requirements than industry. Displaced workers moving both industry and occupation suffer a higher wage decline than those changing only industry or occupation. Furthermore, the transferability of skills varies across occupations and industries; more specifically, intermediate-level occupations are more demanding in specific skills and impose higher wages losses for displaced workers. Finally, the economic crisis reduced the return on firm-specific skills only in some cases.

The examination of skill specificity/transferability helps firms, workers and policy makers to draw strategies and policies to improve their individual situation and social welfare. The analysis suggest that when experienced workers are displaced and forced to find a job in a different industry, they suffer considerable wage cuts. While displacement imposes costs to workers and society, different choices impact wages differently.

To the authors’ best knowledge, this is the first paper studying the simultaneous impact of industry and occupation tenure on wages using displaced workers due to firm closing. The paper also corrects for the selection of different alternatives after the displacement and uses data from a country characterised by low-job flows and low-worker flows. Finally, the impact of economic crises on return to skills is assessed.

This paper investigates, theoretically and empirically, differences between blacks and whites in the United States concerning the intergenerational transmission of occupational skills and the effects on sons’ earnings. The father–son skill correlation is measured by the correlation coefficient (or cosine of the angle) between the father’s skill vector and the son’s skill vector. The skill vector comprises an individual’s occupational characteristics from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT). According to data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), white sons earn higher wages in occupations that require skills similar to those of their fathers, whereas black sons in such circumstances incur a wage loss. A large portion of the racial wage gap is explained by the father–son skill correlation. However, a significant unexplained racial wage gap remains at the lower tail of the wage distribution.

This study attempts to investigate the interrelationship between choice-based educational achievement and employability prospects across the skill-based occupations amongst the youth in India.

This study relies on the use of National Sample Survey (NSS) data on employment and unemployment for the 68th round (2011–2012) and the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) (2017–2018). To estimate the relative contributions of choice-based educational attainment affecting the skill-based employment of youth in a different category of occupations ( high/medium/low skilled), the multinomial logistic regression and its marginal effects have been used.

The study finds educational attainment both as an opportunity (improvising employability in the high and medium skill occupation) and a challenge (highest unemployment amongst the educated) while ensuring skill-based youth employability. Despite the growing enrolment of youth in education, youth from a general education background does not find sustained employability prospects in high-skill occupations.

Vocational education highlights a brighter employability prospect but the acceptability of the same amongst the youth needs a policy intervention.

Educational choices need an intervention based on market-driven apprenticeships and training.

The decline of overall employability in the low-skill occupation raises a threat to inclusive development as such youth results to Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET), better identified as the unproductive economic youth.

This study attempts to investigate that “how far the choice of educational attainment (general/technical/vocational) is able to make youth a fit in the world of work?” in the Indian context, where the youth constitute the highest share in the population.