The paper proposes an empirical examination of the consequences of educational expansion and reform in four European countries in terms of school-leavers' labour market chances. The empirical analyses focus on the returns to higher education on the one side and vocational qualification as...

"Over the last two decades, youth unemployment emerged as one of the major problems of many contemporary European societies. As educational achievement is regularly claimed to prevent labour market exclusion, this paper explores the educational stratification of unemployment in early labour...

During the last decades most industrialised countries have experienced a rapid expansion of tertiary education enrolments. The sector of tertiary education became more differentiated through the creation of many different subjects, fields and curricula of study. At the same time, men and women...

The transition from initial education to work has received a great amount of attention, but hardly any research treats this process holistically. This paper focuses on the serial succession of statuses instead of on single events in the early years after leaving full-time education. As...