This article explores Belman and Heywood's sheepskin effect hypothesis using a modified Mincerian wage equation to test the sheepskin effect of returns on education in Colombia. This analysis is based on the 2014 Living Standards Survey from the National Department of Statistics. It includes variables that capture the possession of different…

The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition (BOD) is a popular method for studying the contributions of explanatory factors to social inequality. The results have often been given causal interpretations. While recent work and this article both show that some types of BOD are equivalent to a counterfactual-based treatment effect/selection bias decomposition,…

A burgeoning literature has documented the importance of elite colleges. Yet, little is known about access to elite education and its labor market implications in China, a country that produces one in every five college graduates in the world. College admission in China is governed by a single exam--the national college entrance exam, and the…

This article analyses the differences between expected and actual wages of VET students and graduates. It uses a survey of VET students enrolled in schools in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and data about employed VET graduates from the Labour Force Survey. The model of determinants of wages, expected or actual, estimated separately on each dataset,…

A central challenge for local skills strategies is whether they can contribute to 'inclusive growth' including more and better jobs across a local economy. Skills strategies, it has been argued, must go beyond simply boosting skills supply and be integrated with policies that shape employer demand for, and utilisation of, skills, including…

Further education (FE) plays a key part in the post-16 educational landscape in England in delivering technical and academic education that is vital to the country's supply of skilled workers. Yet, despite this importance, the sector has been facing significant challenges in recent years, including critical staff shortages in some subject areas.…

Over a half century ago, researchers found that so-called classic professions attract socially advantaged recruits with better labour market outcomes; however, as semi professions become increasingly institutionalized, and classic professional programs expand, differences between these two groups may be less pronounced. Using Statistics Canada's…

The OECD Survey of Adult Skills is the jewel in the crown of its Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). This paper argues that the findings and policy lessons from the project to date justify the high hopes which were placed in PIAAC when detailed planning for the project began in 2003. First, it presents a brief…

Positional competition in the labour market entails graduate opportunities that depend not only on graduates' skills, experience and abilities, but also on how their educational credentials compare to those of others. In this study, we examined the positional competition in the Finnish labour market and compared the influence of different 'degree…

Previous research has shown that female doctoral graduates earn less than male doctoral graduates; however, there has been little research on the determinants of this gender pay gap. This paper investigates the determinants of the gender pay gap among doctoral graduates in Germany. By relying on human capital theory, traditional gender roles and…

Transnational Education (TNE) has often been used as a measure to support the economic sustainability of the institution of higher learning involved. But in recent times, TNE has become one of the important avenues for Higher Education Institutions (HEI) to improve their International Students Portfolios without bringing the students to the HEI…

Al-Ahsa Governorate in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It also investigated the impact of job satisfaction on their professional commitment. To achieve the objectives of the study, quantitative and qualitative methods were used to verify the level of job satisfaction and its impact on professional commitment. To obtain relevant and sufficient data,…

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, I study heterogeneity in graduate students' responses to financial incentives. The incentive was given by a student aid reform in Norway that was intended to increase the proportion of students who graduate on time by offering a reduction of their student loan. Using a difference-in-difference strategy and detailed Norwegian…

We randomly assign applicants to over-subscribed programs to study the effects of teaching hard and soft skills in vocational training and examine their impacts on skills acquisition and labor market outcomes using both survey and administrative data. We find that providing vocational training that either emphasizes social or technical skills…