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Youth employment decline and the structural change of skill
[journal article]
Abstract Labor market prospects for youth have deteriorated significantly in many OECD countries over recent decades. While the extent and consequences of falling youth employment are commonly studied, attempts at understanding its causes have been much more limited. The present paper attempts to fill this e... view more
Labor market prospects for youth have deteriorated significantly in many OECD countries over recent decades. While the extent and consequences of falling youth employment are commonly studied, attempts at understanding its causes have been much more limited. The present paper attempts to fill this explanatory gap. We suggest that the secular decline in youth employment can be accounted for by the structural change of skill. This process of structural change has two interrelated components: (a) one part where skill supply (individual educational attainment) and skill demand (educational requirements of jobs) grow together in what can be called matched upgrading and (b) another part where excess skill supply leads to mismatch and crowding-out. These components of skill growth have commonly been treated separately and incompletely in the literature. We build on both of them in developing our account of why the labor market for youth has weakened. Using data on 10 European countries from the EU Labor Force Surveys over the period 1998 to 2015, we estimate associations between the structural change of skill and youth employment decline. The main conclusion is that both matched skill upgrading and overeducation are strongly and negatively linked to young people’s employment chances.... view less
Keywords
adolescent; employment; education; attainment of qualification; labor market; structural change; EU
Classification
Labor Market Research
Sociology of the Youth, Sociology of Childhood
Free Keywords
EU-LFS; skill upgrading; overeducation
Document language
English
Publication Year
2020
Page/Pages
p. 47-76
Journal
European Societies, 22 (2020) 1
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2018.1552981
ISSN
1469-8307
Status
Published Version; peer reviewed
Licence
Creative Commons - Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0