This essay delivers two main innovations with respect to the existing literature. First, and foremost, by extending the work of Nicaise (2010) relative to the reservation wage to the case of overeducation, we propose a statistical test to discriminate between alternative theoretical...

This essay provides a comprehensive interpretative framework to understand the reasons why the school-to-work transition (SWT) is so slow and hard in Italy. The country is a typical example of the South European SWT regime, where the educational system is typically rigid and sequential, the...

This essay discusses the determinants of youth unemployment within the EU and then the alternative policy options currently at stake. We argue that youth unemployment regards especially some peripheral EU countries and is due to a mix of factors that should be addressed more vigorously, starting...

Purpose – There is a long period from completing studies to finding a permanent or temporary (but at least satisfactory) job in all European countries, especially in Mediterranean countries, including Italy. This paper aims to study the determinants of this duration and measure them, for the...

In this paper we study whether the presence of binding liquidity constraints and the existence of fixed costs can explain the underinvestment of parents in their children's human capital. We first incorporate these two potential mechanisms into the theoretical model of Raut & Tran (2005) and...

In this paper we use a large official employer-employee dataset, which includes almost the whole universe of business firms, to document and decompose the rising graduates postgraduates’ wage differentials in Portugal. Using a non-parametric matching exercise, we pay particular attention to...

Peacetime military service has both positive and negative effects on human capital. While it depreciates academic abilities it also enhances non-cognitive skills. The net effect of conscription is hard to identify due to issues of self-selection, endogenous timing and omitted variables bias. We...

We use (donut) regression discontinuity design and difference-in-differences estimators to estimate the impact of a one-shot hiring subsidy targeted at low-educated unemployed youths during the Great Recession recovery in Belgium. The subsidy increases job-finding in the private sector by 10...

We evaluate the impact of hiring subsidies for unemployed jobseekers in Wallonia, the Frenchspeaking region in the south of Belgium. The special feature of these subsidies is that they are more readily available for low-educated youths, who are eligible from registration as a jobseeker or a few...

This paper is the first to examine whether and how overeducation and overskilling, considered separately and in interaction, influence workers' job satisfaction at European level. It also investigates the moderating role of employment contracts. Our results, based on a unique pan-European...