This paper surveys the emerging economics literature on the relationship between employee training and firm performance. Most studies find very high returns to training, at least from the perspective of firms, indicating that the costs of training can be recouped in short periods of time. These...

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, policymakers have been increasingly striving to support female entrepreneurship as a possible growth driver. This paper contributes to reconciling mixed findings in the literature on the effectiveness of entrepreneurial training with an analysis...

As China's firms upgrade their position in the quality ladder, vocational education may become more important. In this paper, we study returns to secondary vocational education in China paying attention to individual heterogeneity. We use instrumental variables based on geographical and...

Starting in 1999, the Bologna Process reformed the German five-year study system for a first degree into the three-year bachelor's (BA) system to harmonize study lengths in Europe and improve competitiveness. This reform unintentionally challenged the German apprenticeship system that offers...

In this paper, we use the Chinese General Social Survey data (2010-2017) to analyse the returns to different education qualifications. We additionally compare the returns to vocational education with returns to academic education, at both the upper secondary level and the tertiary level....

This paper is among the firsts to investigate the impact of overeducation and overskilling on workers' wages using a unique pan-European database covering twenty-eight countries for the year 2014, namely the CEDEFOP's European Skills and Jobs (ESJ) survey. Overall, the results suggest a wage...

Technological change and globalization have sparked debates on the changing demand for skills in western labour markets, especially for middle skilled workers who have seen their tasks replaced. This paper provides a new data set, which is based on text data from curricula of the entire Dutch...

This paper presents evidence on the short and long-term impact of the first COVID-19 wave on India's rural youth. We interviewed about 2,000 vocational trainees from Bihar and Jharkhand between March 2020 and March 2021. We report a stark difference between men and women: while many male workers...

This paper evaluates the impact on employment probabilities of two training programs funded by the European Social Fund in the province of Bolzano, Italy. The programs were addressed to particularly vulnerable groups which were much less skilled and educated than the control group from the...

We document and analyse the wage gap between vocational and general secondary education in Portugal between 1994 and 2013. As Portuguese workers have been educated in different school systems, we have to distinguish birth cohorts. Analysing the wage gaps within cohorts, we find no support for...