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Research memorandum 'That's what friends are for? The impact of peer characteristics on early school-leaving'
May 7, 2012
In this paper we investigate if peer relations affect a student’s risk of early school-leaving. We use the sociometric data collection from the Dutch "Secondary Education Pupil Cohort 1999" to identify peer relations in a sample of almost 20,000 students in the first grade of secondary education (mean age 13). This information is matched to data on educational attainment from 1999 to 2010 for these students, to measure later early school-leaving by both the focal students as well as their peers. Our results show that both being friends with future early school-leavers as well as popularity among future early school-leavers increases the risk of students to be early school-leavers later in their educational career while other characteristics of the peer group such as gender composition, ethnic composition, average (non)cognitive skills and average socioeconomic background have no effects on the risk of early school-leaving. And while characteristics like gender, ethnicity and socio-economic background play an important role in peer selection, the future dropout status does not have a major impact on peer selection.
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Royal decoration for Hans Heijke
April 27, 2012
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Research memorandum 'The effects of cognitive and non-cognitive skills on early school-leaving'
April 20, 2012
In this paper we investigate how non-cognitive skills can explain individual differences in early school-leaving controlling for cognitive skills. We use a large Dutch representative longitudinal cohort study "Secondary Education Pupil Cohort 1999." In the first year of this study, personality was assessed with the FFPI as part of a comprehensive student questionnaire. Our results show that while cognitive skills play an important role in explaining early school-leaving, non-cognitive skills such as achievement motivation, conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness to experience play an important role as well. In addition, we find that differences in non-cognitive skills affect the impact of cognitive skills performance on early school-leaving.
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Research memorandum 'Do migrant girls always perform better? Differences between the reading and math scores of 15-year-old daughters and sons of migrants in PISA 2009 and variations by region of origin and country of destination'
April 16, 2012
As a follow-up of earlier analyses of the educational performance of all pupils with a migration background with Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) waves 2003 and 2006, we analyze the differences between the educational performance of 15-year old daughters and sons of migrants from specific regions of origin countries living in different destination countries. We use the newest PISA 2009 wave. Instead of analyzing only Western countries as destination countries, we analyze the educational performance of 16,612 daughters and 16,804 sons of migrants in destination countries across Asia, Europe, Latin America, and Oceania. We distinguish 62 origin countries and 12 origin areas in 30 destination countries. We test three hypotheses: 1) The daughters of migrants from poorer, more traditional regions perform much better in reading than comparable sons of migrants from the same origin regions, while the daughters of migrants from more affluent and liberal regions perform slightly better in reading than comparable sons of migrants from the same regions. 2) Individual socioeconomic background has a stronger effect on the educational performance of daughters of migrants than on the performance of sons of migrants. 3) The performance of female native pupils has a higher influence on the performance of migrant daughters than the performance of male native pupils has on the performance of migrant sons. The first hypothesis can only partly be accepted. Female migrant pupils have both higher reading and math scores than comparable male migrant pupils, and these gender differences among migrant pupils are larger than among comparable native pupils. The additional variation in educational performance by region of origin is, however, not clearly related to the poverty or traditionalism of regions. Neither the second nor the third hypothesis can be accepted, given our results.
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ROA online newsletter March 2012
March 21, 2011
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Report 'Pensioenverwachtingen en personeelsbeleid. Verslag van de ROA enquête 2011'
March, 2012
The report presents the results of large matched employer-employee surveys that took place in 2011. It provides insights into the determinants of the motivation to retire later, and the extent to which HR-policies of organizations facilitate continued work of older employees. The report shows that young workers overestimate their pension rights, and that this is partially due to financial illiteracy. Furthermore, it is found that a large group of older workers will not be less productive than younger workers, and that employees have a considerably less positive opinion of the HR-policy in their organization than their employer. Most interestingly, despite the forecasted labor market shortages due to the aging labor force, employers do not seem to be engage more often in active policies aimed at retaining their older employees.
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Research memorandum 'Retirement and cognitive development: are the retired really inactive?'
February 27, 2012
This paper uses longitudinal test data to analyze the relation between retirement and cognitive development. Controlling for individual fixed effects, we find that retirees face greater declines in information processing speed than those who remain employed. However, remarkably, their cognitive flexibility declines less, an effect that appears to be persistent 6 years after retirement. Both effects of retirement on cognitive development are comparable to those of a five to six-year age difference. They cannot be explained by (1) a relief effect after being employed in low-skilled jobs, (2) mood swings or (3) changes in lifestyle. Controlling for changes in blood pressure, which are negatively related to cognitive flexibility, we still find lower declines in cognitive flexibility for retirees. Since the decline in information processing speed after retirement holds particularly for the low educated, activating these persons after retirement could lower the social costs of an aging society.
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Research memorandum 'Education, cognitive skills and earnings of males and females'
February 27, 2012
This paper analyzes the relationship between cognitive skills, measured at age 12, and earnings of males and females at the age of 35, conditional on their attained educational level. Employing a large data set that combines a longitudinal school cohort survey with income data from Dutch national tax files, our findings show that cognitive skills and specifically math skills are rewarded on the labor market, but more for females than for males. The main factor driving this result is that cognitive skills appear to be better predictors of schooling outcomes for males than for females. Once males have achieved the higher levels of education, they more often choose programs with high earning perspectives like economics and engineering, even if their level of math skills is relatively low.
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Research memorandum 'Which skills protect graduates against a slack labour market?'
January 9, 2012
This paper explores the relationship between graduates' skill levels and the risk of overeducation and unemployment in 17 European countries. We distinguish between field-specific and general skills and between two labour market segments, the occupational domain of a particular field of study and the labour market segment which requires general skills. In line with the predictions of the crowding out hypothesis, we find that the level of protection afforded by field-specific skills against the risk of overeducation increases with the degree of excess labour supply in the occupational domain of the graduate's field of study. Conversely, general skills offer more protection against the risk of overeducation when excess labour supply in the labour market segment which requires general skills is higher. Field-specific skills also protect graduates against the risk of unemployment, whereas graduates' level of general skills appears to be unrelated to the risk of becoming unemployed.
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Technical report 'Aansluitingsproblematiek op de regionale arbeidsmarkt'
December 2011
This report investigates matching problems on the regional labour market for 40 different COROP regions in the Netherlands in 2008 at the level of secondary vocational education. As expected, we find a significant negative relationship between the unemployment and job vacancy rate. Furthermore, we find a significant negative relationship between the U/V curve and the match between education and the labour market. Compared to BOL students, BBL students are significantly more likely to qualify the match between their education and the labour market as “sufficient”. Furthermore, the education fields health care and behavioural and political sciences have a better score than the reference groups.
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Report 'De arbeidsmarkt naar opleiding en beroep tot 2016'
December 20, 2011
The report presents forecasts for the Dutch labour market until 2016. It discusses future developments in labour supply and demand by educational types and levels, and by occupation. In particular, the report focusses on a number of key indicators for bottlenecks in the labour market, and the future labour market prospects of graduates.
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Research memorandum 'The role of peers in estimating tenure-performance profiles:
Evidence from personnel data'
November 22, 2011
In this paper, we estimate tenure-performance profiles using unique panel data that contain detailed information on individual workers’performance. We find that 10 per cent increase in tenure leads to an increase in performance of 5.5 per cent of a standard deviation. This translates to an average performance increase of about 75 per cent within the first year of the employment relationship. Furthermore, we show that there are peer effects in learning on-the-job: Workers placed in teams with more experienced and thus more productive peers perform significantly better than those placed in teams with less experienced peers. An increase in the average team tenure by one standard deviation leads to an increase of 11 to 14 per cent of a standard deviation in performance.
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ROA Brochure 'Associate degree opleidingen en arbeidsmarktrelevantie, Een handleiding voor pilotronde 5'
November 21, 2011
Upon request of the Commission Associate Degree, ROA developed a brochure for institutes of higher vocational education to help them underpin the labour market relevance of Associate degrees.
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Research memorandum 'Flexible contracts and human capital investments'
November 21, 2011
As suggested by human capital theory, workers with flexible contracts participate less often in training than those with permanent contracts. We find that this is merely due to the fact that flexworkers receive less employer–funded training, a gap they can only partly compensate for by their own training investments. Flexworkers particularly participate less in firm–specific training that is meant to keep up with new skill demands than workers with permanent contracts. However, for those who participate in employer–funded firm–specific training, a temporary contract appears to facilitate the transition to a permanent contract with the same employer. However, this does not hold for participation in self–paid training. This training, which is usually general training, does not help in finding a better job.
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Research memorandum 'Measuring the (income) effect of disability insurance generosity on labour market participation'
November 14, 2011
We analyze the employment effect of a law that provides for a 36 percent increase in the generosity of disability insurance (DI) for claimants who are, as a result of their lack of skills and of the labour market conditions they face, deemed unlikely to find a job. The selection process for treatment is therefore conditional on having a low probability of employment, making evaluation of its effect intrinsically difficult. We exploit the fact that the benefit increase is only available to individuals aged 55 or older, estimating its impact using a regression discontinuity approach. Our first results indicate a large drop in employment for disabled individuals who receive the increase in the benefit. Testing for the linearity of covariates around the eligibility age threshold reveals that the age at which individuals start claiming DI is not continuous: the benefit increase appears to accelerate the entry rate of individuals aged 55 or over. We obtain new estimates excluding this group of claimants, and find that the policy decreases the employment probability by 8 percent. We conclude that the observed DI generosity elasticity of 0.22 on labour market participation is mostly due to income effects since benefit receipt is not work contingent in the system studied.
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Research memorandum 'Why do recent graduates enter into flexible jobs?'
October 18, 2011
The share of flexible jobs on the Dutch labour market is among the highest in Western countries, in particular for recent graduates. In this study we examine why recent graduates enter into temporary contracts and whether flexible jobs match their qualifications worse than permanent jobs do. Graduates that enter into flexible jobs face large wage penalties, a worse job match and less training participation than those entering into permanent jobs, even after correcting for ability differences. When the labour market situation for a particular field of education deteriorates, a larger share of recent graduates is forced into flexible jobs, which may threaten their position on the labour market in the long run. Flexible work among graduates is unrelated to their willingness to take risks. Only for university graduates are there any indications that flexible jobs may provide stepping stones to permanent jobs.
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ROA online newsletter September 2011
September 28, 2011
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Research memorandum 'The effects of training on own and co-worker productivity: evidence from a field experiment'
September 12, 2011
This paper analyses the effects of work-related training on worker productivity. To identify the causal effects from training, we combine a field experiment that randomly assigns workers to treatment and control groups with panel data on individual worker performance before and after training. We find that participation in the training programme leads to a 10 percent increase in performance. Moreover, we provide experimental evidence for externalities from treated workers on their untreated teammates: An increase of 10 percentage points in the share of treated peers leads to a performance increase of 0.51 percent. We provide evidence that the estimated effects are causal and not the result of employee selection into and out of training. Furthermore, we find that the performance increase is not due to lower quality provided by the worker.
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Research memorandum 'A Test for the Convexity of Human Well-Being over the Life Cycle: Longitudinal Evidence from a 20-Year Panel'
September 12, 2011
A huge cross-section literature, written by economists and others, argues that human well-being is U-shaped through the life cycle. In many cases this U-shape is robust (with as a well-known exception the pattern evident in some U.S. data sets if few independent variables are included). However, a lively debate is currently ongoing about its true shape. This paper discusses the identification problem of age, time, and cohort effects. It suggests a simple way to interpret estimates of age variables in a first-difference framework. Building on McKenzie’s (2006) methodology, the paper shows that no extra assumptions are needed in order to identify the second derivative of well-being to age, i.e. to estimate the changes in changes in the actual age and well-being relationship. An empirical application, using a large German data set, finds that human well-being is convex in age until after midlife, which is approximately consistent with a U-shaped pattern through life, and not with the concave relationship sometimes found in U.S. studies.
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Report "Schoolverlaters tussen onderwijs en arbeidsmarkt 2010"
September 6, 2011
The report presents the results of the national graduate surveys (lower secondary education up to higher vocational education) that took place at the end of 2010. The report provides insight into the transition of graduates into the labor market as well as into further education. Next to results of the national graduate surveys, the report also presents the results of a survey among Early School Leavers, their reasons for leaving school pre-mature and their future intentions.
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Fact sheet "Schoolverlaters tussen onderwijs en arbeidsmarkt 2010, Feiten en cijfers"
September 6, 2011
The Factsheet presents a summary of the key results of the national graduate surveys that took place at the end of 2010.
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Research memorandum 'High and steady or low and rising? Life-cycle earnings patterns in vocational and general education'
August 22, 2011
In this paper, we compare experience-earnings profiles of employees with vocational and general education background in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, three countries with fundamentally different education systems. Using Mixed-Effects Linear Regression Models we show that earnings of vocationally educated employees are higher in the initial phase of their career. However, those with a general education background catch up over time in the labor market. Life-cycle differences in earnings are more pronounced in Germany than in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
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Report 'Arbeidsmarkt-monitor Metalektro, Editie 2011'
July, 2011
The report (in Dutch) summarizes the findings and developments in the 'Metalektro' sector (roughly NACE 27-29) in 2010. It is based on two large employer surveys in the sectors, and four short questionnaires. HRM managers of the companies are approached twice a year through e-mail to participate in web based questionnaire. About 200 companies participate by answering the questionnaire. The questionnaire contains core questions on employment, vacancies, and is extended by topics like training, social and product innovation, and HRM policies. In addition, four times a year a Quickscan is send to participating companies. It contains three topical statements in addition to five monitoring questions on recent and expected employment developments in the sector. Interviews with key HRM personnel are held on a regular basis to extend the project with qualitative information on recent trends and developments in the sector. These interviews are incorporated in the annual report.
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Report 'Een leven lang leren in Nederland'
May 31, 2011
In a knowledge economy much attention is devoted to the knowledge development and learning behavior of the workforce. Learning may involve attending formal courses, but also learning at the workplace. This informal learning involves learning by doing, but can also relate to the things people learn from colleagues or from the feedback of supervisors. An intensive learning process can lead to a greater accumulation of knowledge and skills and thus increase employability. With this report we document the formal and informal learning and knowledge development in the Netherlands on the basis of three waves of the ROA Lifelong Learning Survey (2004, 2007 and 2010). The monitor section of the survey is unchanged over the years. This allows for the description of trends in learning, and for an identification of the factors that promote or inhibit learning.
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Research memorandum 'The effects of educational systems, school-composition, track-level, parental background and immigrants' origin on the achievement of 15-years old native and immigrant students. A reanalysis of PISA 2006'
May 30, 2011
The main research question of this paper is the combined estimation of the effects of educational systems, school-composition and track-level on the educational achievement of 15-years-old students. We specifically focus on the effects of socioeconomic and ethnic background on achievement scores and to what extent these effects are affected by characteristics of the school, track or educational system these students are in. In doing so, we examine the ‘sorting’ mechanisms of schools and tracks in highly stratified, moderately stratified and comprehensive education systems. We use data from the 2006 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) wave. Compared to previous research in this area the main contribution of this paper is that we explicitly include track-level and school-level as separate units of analyses, which leads to less biased results of the effects of characteristics of the educational system. The results highlight the importance of including track-level and school-level factors in the debate of educational inequality of opportunity for students in different education contexts. The findings clearly indicate that the effects of educational system characteristics are flawed if the analysis uses only a country and a student level and ignores the track- and school-level characteristics. Moreover the inclusion of the track-level is necessary to avoid overestimation of the school-composition effect, especially in stratified educational systems. From a policy perspective, the most important finding is that educational system are not uniformly ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but they have different consequences for different groups. Some groups are better off in comprehensive systems, while other groups are better off in moderately or highly stratified systems.
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Report 'Versoberde pensioenen en de werkinzet van oudere werknemers. Vervolgmeting (2010) VPL-onderzoek'
May 25, 2011
Retrenched pension rights affect motivated workers: Organisations within the public sector do not stimulate the continued labor force participation of their older workers. Older workers with retrenched pension rights due to a shock in the Dutch pension system receive less cognitive demanding tasks instead of that they are stimulated to remain active. This leads to that most older workers are dissatisfied with the HR-policy of their employer. Moreover, this study shows that the workers with retrenched pension rights make significantly less unpaid over hours. This especially holds for workers who are highly engaged to their job.
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Report 'Ontwikkelingscheque, Uitwerking Advies Denktank Leren en Werken'
May 10, 2011
In order to increase the participation in lifelong learning, the Dutch Denktank Leren en Werken has proposed to launch a training voucher. This report – commissioned by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment – discusses various national and international training voucher pilot projects. From this inventory study as well as interviews with experts, we propose how a ‘development voucher’ system could be organized and introduced in the Netherlands. A good first step would be to introduce the voucher for low skilled workers in sectors where employment is falling.
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Report 'Depreciatie van menselijk kapitaal'
May 3, 2011
Workers’ human capital is a crucial asset in a knowledge economy. However, a person’s human capital can depreciate fast, e.g. when skills are not used or underused, or when innovations in the production process result in demand for new skills. This report – commissioned by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation – deals with the evolution of a person’s human capital during the life course. The effect of unemployment and inactivity because of caring obligations receives particular attention.
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