Replacement demand due to regular and early retirement, disablement, temporary withdrawals of women owing to birth and child raising, et cetera, constitutes an important element of the future demand for newcomers on the labour market. It is, however, often neglected in manpower forecasting...

Human capital factor endowments have become one of the main determinants of international competitiveness. Both to catch up in the technological race and to increase the long-term flexibility of the workforce, industrialized countries require a highly skilled labour force. This paper analyzes...

This paper analyzes whether part-time employment is beneficial for firm productivityin the service sector. Using a unique dataset on the Dutch pharmacy sectorthat includes the work hours of all employees and a “hard” physical measure offirm productivity, we estimate a production function...

The paper tests the validity of the Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek (HOV) theorem of international trade for the Netherlands by comparing the true with the trade-revealed factor endowments of human and physical capital. The factor content analysis shows that the Netherlands is abundant in producer...

Firms and apprentices have conflicting interests with respect to the content of training programmes. On the basis of a model for the investment decision in occupation-specific and generic training, I will show that, in the case of imperfect competition, firms are not only unwilling to pay for...

This paper analyzes the occupational structures of 25 European Union countries during the period 2000-2004. Shift-share analyses have been used to decompose cross-country differences in occupational structure into within industry and between industry effects. The static analysis for 2004 shows...

This paper explores the effects of colleges for higher vocational education on the labour market success of their graduates. Using data about the labour market position of Dutch graduates from higher vocational education, and applying multi-level statistical modelling techniques it is shown that...

Although most types of education give access to a range of occupations, the educational background determines to a large extent the labour market possibilities of a worker. However, since educational systems vary widely between different countries, there is a question about the specific role of...

This paper provides new insight into the role of generic and vocational competencies during the transition from education to the labor market. Using data on the labor market situation of Dutch higher education graduates, we analyze the allocation over different educational domains, the incidence...

This paper uses a natural experiment approach to identify the effects of an exogenouschange in future pension benefits on workers’ training participation. We use uniquematched survey and administrative data for male employees in the Dutch public sectorwho were born in 1949 or 1950. Only the...