This paper documents aspects of demand for and supply of training in Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States. The first part presents descriptive information about the initiation, financing, provision and methods of work-related training. In all four countries, firms provide financial support for training which is initiated by the worker or which is given outside the firm. This suggests that firms pay for general training. In Switzerland employees occupy a more prominent position in initiating and financing training than their counterparts in the United States and the other countries. The second part of the paper exploits information from workers who wanted to receive training but did not do so to disentangle demand and supply factors in training. Results indicate that different training levels by level of formal schooling can be attributed to worker preferences.
There is strong assortative mating by field of study. To examine to which extent this is due to self selection or to a causal effect of access to specific "marriage markets", we use data from participants in admission lotteries of four oversubscribed studies in the Netherlands. For each of the four studies, we find that the winning compliers of an admission lottery are significantly more likely than the losing compliers to have a partner from the lottery study, whereas losing compliers are only marginally more likely to have a partner from the lottery study than would occur under random matching. These results indicate that assortative mating by field of study is largely due to marriage market access and that self selection plays a minor role. JEL-codes: I26, J12, J13.
We exploit admission lotteries to estimate the payoffs to the dentistry study in the Netherlands. Using data from up to 22 years after the lottery, we find that in most years after graduation dentists earn around 50,000 Euros more than they would earn in their next-best profession. The payoff is larger for men than for women but does not vary with high school GPA. The large payoffs cannot be attributed to longer working hours, larger human capital investments or sacrifices in family outcomes. The natural explanation is that Dutch dentists extract a monopoly rent, which we attribute to the limited supply of dentists in the Netherlands. We discuss policies to curtail this rent.
This paper investigates whether studying abroad increases the propensity to live abroad later on. We use an instrumental variable approach based on cut-offs in the ranking of Dutch higher education graduates who applied for a scholarship programme for outstanding students. Applicants ranked above the cut-off received a scholarship to study abroad. Applicants ranked below the cut-off were denied a scholarship. Assignment of a scholarship increases the probability to study abroad and the number of months spent studying abroad. Studying abroad and the number of months spent studying abroad increase the probability of currently living abroad.
What is the effect of school consolidation on student achievement? Theory gives little guidance because possibly positive effects from larger school size can be offset by negative effects from reduced choice and competition. We investigate these issues empirically by analyzing the effects on students’ achievement of a consolidation reform that took place in Dutch primary education in the mid-1990s. The reform was implemented by increasing the minimum required school size, leading to an increase in actual school size and a reduction in the number of schools. For identification, we exploit variation between municipalities. We find that an increase in the minimum required school size of 10% has a small positive effect on student achievement of 0.72% of a standard deviation. Further analysis indicates that this effect can be mainly attributed to the increase in actual school size; reduced competition and choice do not seem to have harmed student achievement. We also find no evidence that the consolidation effect is driven by reduced school segregation or the elimination of small schools that were—given their size—underperforming (JEL I21, I22, H75, D40).
Gender differences in competitiveness are often discussed as a potential explanation for gender differences in education and labor market outcomes.We correlate an incentivized measure of competitiveness with an important career choice of secondary school students in the Netherlands.At the age of 15, these students have to pick one out of four study profiles, which vary in how prestigious they are.While boys and girls have very similar levels of academic ability, boys are substantially more likely than girls to choose more prestigious profiles.We find that competitiveness is as important a predictor of profile choice as gender.More importantly, up to 23 percent of the gender difference in profile choice can be attributed to gender differences in competitiveness.This lends support to the extrapolation of laboratory findings on competitiveness to labor market settings.
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