This article provides evidence about differences in the recent tertiary education expansion in Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia. Focusing on these differences, we have examined private returns to tertiary education acquired before and after the tertiary education expansion. We compare these returns as follows: Austria with…

This paper reports that between 2008 and 2009, unemployment rates across OECD countries increased among people at all educational levels, but rose to especially troubling heights among people without an upper secondary education. In 2009, the average employment rate across OECD countries was much higher for individuals with a tertiary (i.e.…

Background information: During the late 1970s and the early 1980s, West Germany witnessed a reversal of gender differences in educational attainment, as females began to outperform males. Purpose: The main objective was to analyse which processes were behind the reversal of gender differences in educational attainment after 1945. The theoretical…

In Germany, students are streamed at age ten into an academic or nonacademic track. We demonstrate that the randomly allocated disadvantage of being born just before as opposed to just after the cutoff date for school entry leads to substantially different schooling experiences. Relatively young students are initially only two-thirds as likely to…

Using a large German Socioeconomic Panel data set for the period 1984-98, investigates the wage effects of two different measures of educational mismatch, overeducation and undereducation, when controlling for unobserved heterogeneity. Finds that wages differences between overeducated and undereducated workers totally disappear in most cases.…

Examines why German firms hire overeducated employees in low-skill jobs and pay them more than correctly educated ones. Finds that overeducated employees are more productive, enjoy better health, participate more in on-the-job training, and have longer firm tenure than their correctly educated colleagues. (Contains 28 references.) (PKP)

This book contains 17 papers devoted to the following four aspects of the transition to adulthood: effects of alterations in the structure of opportunity; effects of prior experiences in the family; effects of prior experience in the workplace; and career development and marriage formation during a period of rising inequality. The following papers…