OSC Scientific Seminar 2021-2022

Friday 29th April 2022, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, 1 St-Thomas, Room K008

Coordinated Markets, School-to-Work Linkages,
and Labor Market Outcomes in the European Union

Thomas A. DiPrete

 Giddings Professor of Sociology, Columbia University in the City of New York
and Director, Institute of Social and Economic Research and Policy

A large literature in both sociology and political science has theorized about the importance of country differences in skill formation systems for labor market outcomes.
Focusing on twenty-one European countries, my study establishes that countries differ in the strength of the pathways that connect educational credentials to the occupational structure, though there is considerable variability in the country rankings of the strength of individual pathways. Pathway strength matters for the quality of occupational matching, for employment and earnings, and for the earnings gap between well matched and less well-matched workers. In general, the total effects of local linkage strength are to raise earnings and to lower unemployment risk, though positive total effects of local linkage on earnings are concentrated at the lower tertiary and non-tertiary educational levels.
The results suggest that pathway effects are stronger in high-linkage countries for male and for older female workers, and the results also support the hypothesis that local linkage is more protective against unemployment in high linkage countries. However, the local linkage effect is not consistently higher in high-linkage countries when one analyzes the data one educational level at a time. Therefore, the most robust effect of high linkage countries appears to be the fact that – even taking internal heterogeneity into account – their pathways from educational credentials to occupations generally show tighter linkage along with its attendant advantage on labor market outcomes.

Registration is mandatory 

To find out more:

See the webpage of Thomas A. DiPrete