This paper uses a 2016/2017 sample of 1107 freshly minted university graduates from a public and a private university in Malaysia. Against a backdrop of an institutional setting very much different from that of western countries' and issues of high living costs and graduate unemployment, we analyse how academic performance affects graduates'…

In this paper, we analyse the effects of workers' self-rated attitudinal skills and their performance on vocational skills tests on their wage. The survey was conducted with garment workers who had experience of less than three years in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The constituting elements of attitudinal skills were examined using the questionnaire for…

In-work training is generally regarded as beneficial for employees and in Britain it continues to offer significant gains in earnings. However, little previous research has tested whether training also leads to higher levels of job satisfaction or 'happiness'. Employers need to retain trained employees in order to make training cost-effective, but…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop a measure of soft skills suitable for use in a large survey of Australian adolescents. Design/methodology/approach: A survey was conducted with N = 4,704 Australians aged 15-19 over 2 years. Principal components analysis was performed on 14 self-report items, followed by generalised linear mixed…

Education is key to development strategies in Africa. We use overeducation and undereducation to analyse the effectiveness of education in preparing individuals for employment in Kenya and Ghana, using the Skills Towards Employment and Productivity Survey. Systematic differences in wages between matched, overeducated and undereducated workers hold…

Little empirical literature assessing the impact of Erasmus study program on graduate career prospects exists. All too often, the empirical evidence available is either bias or indirect. Furthermore, the existing differences among study mobility participants and non-participant peers in terms of ability, socioeconomic background or field of study…

Based on Swedish register data from 2003 to 2012, this study attempts to explain over-education and upward mobility among tertiary graduates. Rarely used explanatory factors are central in the analyses, such as 'still in study' and 'field of education'. Tertiary graduates in low-wage jobs are regarded as over-educated. The results of this work…

Recent research on economic returns to higher education in the United States suggests that those with the highest wage returns to a college degree are least likely to obtain one. We extend the study of heterogeneous returns to tertiary education across multiple institutional contexts, investigating how the relationship between wage returns and the…

We use data from the "Trajectoires et Origines" survey to analyze ethnic gaps in education and labor-market outcomes between second-generation immigrants and their French-native counterparts. Our three main findings underscore the importance of family background in explaining lifelong ethnic inequalities. First, second-generation…

Internships are a vital component of vocational education systems. The aim of this study is to understand whether internship programs at vocational schools are correlated with the long-run wages of students. To analyze this, I conduct three sets of analyses using longitudinal survey data from 2013 to 2014 on more than 12,000 vocational students in…

The research question for this study is how education level, gender, and social network affect migrant workers' starting income for their first job in China's urban cities. Our objective is to reveal the interplay of education level, gender, and social network in determining migrant workers' income, which are to the core of the current academic…

This article reports an analysis of the relationship between women's increased participation in higher education and other recent social changes over the last four decades. To date, women's increased involvement in higher education has been studied as either a force for or a consequence of other sociocultural changes. Drawing on data from key…

How important is mastering information and communication technologies (ICT) in modern labour markets? We present the first evidence on this question, drawing on unique data that provide internationally comparable information on ICT skills in 19 countries from the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). Our…

Recent evidence indicates substantial heterogeneity in the returns to skills across countries, but only a few studies have explained the varying patterns in the return to skills. Using the 2013 STEP data for Ghana and Kenya, we estimate the causal effect of cognitive and noncognitive skills on a large set of labour market outcomes by controlling…

Utilizing comprehensive administrative data from Norway I investigate long-term birth month effects. I demonstrate that the oldest children in class have a substantially higher GPA than their younger peers. The birth month differences are larger for low-SES children. Furthermore, I find that the youngest children in class are lagging significantly…