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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the current state of the single European labor market (SELM), its related risks and opportunities, and identify useful measures for reaching the goal of increased European labor mobility.

The authors conducted an online survey among European labor market experts (IZA research and policy fellows) on the current state of the SELM, its determinants, and the role of the Great Recession. The authors evaluate the data using descriptive and regression-based methods.

The experts agree on the SELM’s importance, especially for larger economic welfare, but are not convinced that it has been achieved. To enhance labor mobility across Europe, the respondents identify key factors such as recognizing professional qualifications more efficiently, harmonizing social security systems, and knowing several languages. Moreover, at least 50 percent of the respondents consider positive attitudes – by policy makers and citizens alike – toward free mobility to be important to enhance labor mobility.

The IZA Expert Opinion Survey presents a unique opportunity to learn how numerous experts think about the important issue of European labor market integration and moreover constitutes a valuable extension to public opinion surveys on related topics. This survey’s findings provide a sophisticated basis for a discussion about policy options regarding the SELM.

This paper seeks to shed further light on the native‐migrant differences in economic outcomes. The aim is to investigate labor market reintegration, patterns of job search, and reservation wages across unemployed migrants and natives in Germany.

The paper is based on the IZA Evaluation Dataset, a recently collected rich survey of a representative sample of entrants into unemployment in Germany. The data include a large number of migration variables, allowing us to adapt a recently developed concept of ethnic identity: the ethnosizer. The authors analyze these data using the OLS technique as well as probabilistic regression models.

The results indicate that separated migrants have a relatively slow reintegration into the labor market. It can be argued that this group exerts a relatively low search effort and that it has reservation wages which are moderate, yet still above the level which would imply similar employment probabilities as other groups of migrants.

The findings indicate that special attention needs to be paid by policy makers to various forms of social and cultural integration, as it has significant repercussions on matching in the labor market.

The paper identifies a previously unmapped relationship between ethnic identity and labor market outcomes.

The aim of this paper is to study the economic effects of risk attitudes, time preferences, trust and reciprocity and to compare natives and second generation migrants.

This paper is based on the IZA Evaluation Dataset, a recently collected survey of a representative inflow sample into unemployment in Germany. The data include a large number of migrant‐specific variables as well as information about economic preferences and attitudes. This allows an assessment of whether and how unemployed second generation migrants differ from unemployed natives in terms of economic preferences and attitudes.

Differences are found between the two groups mainly in terms of risk attitudes and positive reciprocity. Second generation migrants have a significantly higher willingness to take risks and they are less likely to have a low amount of positive reciprocity when compared to natives. It was also found that these differences matter in terms of economic outcomes, and more specifically in terms of the employment probability about two months after unemployment entry.

The findings offer interesting perspectives, e.g. with regard to the design and targeting of active labor market policy. It may be reasonable to specifically focus on less risk averse individuals with measures such as job search requirements and monitoring.

This paper provides novel and direct evidence on the relationship between economic preferences, attitudes and labor market reintegration of natives and second generation migrants.

While technical vocational education training (TVET) has been studied in-depth, the evolution and performance patterns of the subject remain unknown and limited. A bibliometric analysis was performed to examine the global scientific literature to assess the state of the art in TVET research over the past 23 years.

The Web of Science (WoS) database was searched to explore TVET-related research from 1999 to 2021, resulting in the identification of 7,512 articles. The VOSviewer software was used to investigate the network of collaboration between authors, institutions, countries and author keywords.

The results reveal that the subject categories of “education” and “educational research” are the most prolific contributors to TVET-related research, with 3,314 articles. Most of the previous studies in Phase I (1999–2006) focussed on human capital resources development in the TVET sector. Phase II (2007–2014) follows with the centralisation of TVET, focussing on technology transition in education. However, in Phase III (2015–2021), researchers appear to focus on vocational studies in higher education towards increasing the productivity of human resources via the implementation of technology transition.

The valuable findings of this study can facilitate better understanding among scholars on the trends of TVET research developments and on the direction of future research.

Youth unemployment is one of the major problems that the economic systems face. Given this issue, the purpose of this paper is to assess whether school-to-work transition is easier for individuals with secondary vocational education compared to general secondary education. The authors want to explore which vocational systems across Europe produce better effects.

The authors use data from a module on “Entry of young people into the labour market” from the 2009 and 2014 European Labour Survey and they estimate multinomial probit models, allowing for violation of the irrelevance of the alternative assumption.

The authors find that in countries with the dual vocational system, vocational education improves employability both in the short and medium run, whereas in countries with a school-based vocational system, results are mixed and, only in some cases, the effect of vocational studies is significantly positive.

Sample size for short-run analysis is a bit small in a few countries (Austria and Germany). Moreover, even if the authors have reason to believe that the methods adopted are mitigating the omitted heterogeneity issues and robustness checks are run on these aspects, these issues cannot be fully excluded.

The authors provide policy implications, showing that dual vocational systems can improve school-to-work transitions and that vocational structure is particularly effective in this case.

The authors provide information on which education model may offer better chance in terms of labour outcomes.

Given the relevance of youth unemployment, the authors provide valuable information on how to mitigate this problem. The use of cross-country comparisons offers great insights on which vocational systems appear to be well-suited to enhance employability.