Elena Meschi

Institutional Reforms and Educational Attainment in Europe: A Long Run Perspective

In this paper we study the effects of educational reforms on school attainment. We construct a dataset of relevant reforms that occurred at the national level over the last century, and match individual information from 24 European countries to the most likely set�?up faced when individual educational choices were undertaken. Our identification strategy relies on temporal and geographical variations in the institutional arrangements, controlling for time/country fixed effects, as well as for country specific time trend. By characterizing each group of reforms for their impact on mean years of education, educational inequality and intergenerational persistence, we show an ideal policy menu which has been available to policymakers. We distinguish between groups of policies that are either ‘inclusive’ or ‘selective’, depending on their diminishing or augmenting impact on inequality and persistence. Finally, we correlate these reform measures to political coalitions prevailing in parliament, finding support for the idea that left�?wing parties support reforms that are inclusive, while right�?wing parties prefer selective ones.

Globalisation vs internal reforms as factors of inequality in transition economies

We examine factors of within‐country income inequality in transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Internal reforms dominate globalisation factors in accounting for inequality, with price liberalisation showing the strongest effect. Privatisation measures also show robust effects. We find some evidence that the extent of the private sector magnifies the impact of price liberalisation. The only role for globalisation seems to be to moderate the adverse impact of internal reforms on inequality.

Varieties of capitalisms and varieties of performances: accounting for inequality in post-Soviet Union transition economies

We partition post‐Soviet Union Transition Economies into two groups: European Union New Member States and countries belonging to the Commonwealth of Independent States or the South Eastern Europe area. Both groups started the 1980s with low levels of inequality, but in the early 2000s the latter group reached a level of inequality seven percentage points higher. We review various factors of inequality and examine whether these had differential effects in the two groups. Foreign Direct Investments and trade flows with the EU had a bigger inequality‐enhancing effect in New Member States. We interpret this as evidence of technological catching‐up and productivity improvements taking place in this region. Other specific reforms, such as privatisation and price liberalisation, had similarly strong effects in the two groups. We also find some evidence of an inequality‐decreasing effect of an indicator of Voice and Accountability in countries outside the EU, and that countries with higher government effectiveness experienced lower levels of inequality. This supports the relevance of institutional capacity in tackling inequality. Finally, we speculate over the effects of the current global crisis on future economic performance.

The Effect on Mental Health of Retiring During the Economic Crisis: Mental Health and Retiring During the Crisis

This paper investigates the causal impact of retirement on late-life mental health, a growing concern for public health, because major depressive disorders are the second leading cause of disability. We shed light on the role of economic conditions in shaping the effect of retirement on mental health by exploiting time and regional variation in the severity of the economic crisis across 10 European countries during 2004-2013. We use data from four waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe and address the potential endogeneity of the retirement decision to mental health by applying a fixed-effects instrumental variables approach. The results indicate that retirement improves the mental health of men but not that of women. This effect is stronger for blue-collar men working in regions that have been severely hit by the economic crisis. These findings may be explained by the worsening of working conditions and the rise in job insecurity stemming from the economic downturn: under these circumstances, exit from the labour force is perceived as a relief. Copyright

The Effect on Mental Health of Retiring During the Economic Crisis

This paper investigates the causal impact of retirement on late-life mental health, a growing concern for public health, since major depressive disorders are the second leading cause of disability. We shed light on the role of economic conditions in shaping the effect of retirement on mental health by exploiting time and regional variation in the severity of the economic crisis across 10 European countries during 2004-2013. We use data from four waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe and address the potential endogeneity of the retirement decision to mental health by applying a fixed effects instrumental variable approach. The results indicate that retirement improves the mental health of men but not that of women. This effect is stronger for blue collar men working in regions that have been severely hit by the economic crisis. These findings may be explained by the worsening of working conditions and the rise in job insecurity stemming from the economic downturn: Under these circumstances, exit from the labour force is perceived as a relief.

Measuring and Detecting Errors in Occupational Coding: an Analysis of SHARE Data

Abstract This article studies coding errors in occupational data, as the quality of this data is important but often neglected. In particular, we recoded open-ended questions on occupation for last and current job in the Dutch sample of the “Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe” (SHARE) using a high-quality software program for ex-post coding (CASCOT software). Taking CASCOT coding as our benchmark, our results suggest that the incidence of coding errors in SHARE is high, even when the comparison is made at the level of one-digit occupational codes (28% for last job and 30% for current job). This finding highlights the complexity of occupational coding and suggests that processing errors due to miscoding should be taken into account when undertaking statistical analyses or writing econometric models. Our analysis suggests strategies to alleviate such coding errors, and we propose a set of equations that can predict error. These equations may complement coding software and improve the quality of occupational coding.

Does training help retaining older workers into employment

The long-term increase in longevity, coupled with the progressive compression of morbidity experienced in Europe in the last decades, improved the well-being of many older individuals. However, a failure to adjust the retirement age has exposed poor households to financial distress (Angelini et al. 2009). Staying longer in the labour force may be a solution to preserve an adequate level of resources and limit the risk of economic deprivation, it is also an effective mean to maintain social ties and foster an active life. However, working longer requires investment in human capital over the life cycle (Mahyew & Rjkers 2004), as acquired skills become obsolete as time goes by. The rapid technological progress prevailing in many sectors makes training the older workforce the only effective policy to prevent skills obsolescence (Bishop 1997, Belloni & Villosio 2014). The aim of this chapter is to investigate whether participation in training helps keeping older workers (aged 50–65) in employment. In particular, we use Wave 4 and Wave 5 of SHARE to test the effect of training participation in 2010 (Wave 4) on changes in labour market status between 2010 and 2012 (Wave 5), controlling for a rich set of observable individual characteristics. Information on self-reported current economic status allows us to distinguish between six labour force states: employed or self-employed, unemployed, permanently sick or disabled, retired, homemaker and “other”. To measure training participation we exploit a question in Wave 4 (part of the module “Activities”) which asks respondents whether they attended any educational or training course in the last twelve months.

The effect of immigrant peers in vocational schools

This paper provides new evidence on how the presence of immigrant peers in the classroom affects native student achievement. The analysis is based on longitudinal administrative data on two cohorts of vocational training students in Italy’s largest region. Vocational training institutions provide the ideal setting for studying these effects because they attract not only disproportionately high shares of immigrants but also the lowest ability native students. We adopt a value added model, and exploit within-school variation both within and across cohorts for identification. Our results show small negative average effects on maths test scores that are larger for low ability native students, strongly non-linear and only observable in classes with a high (top 20%) immigrant concentration. These outcomes are driven by classes with a high average linguistic distance between immigrants and natives, with no apparent role played by ethnic diversity.

Measurement error in occupational coding:an analysis on SHARE data

This article studies the potential measurement errors when coding occupational data. The quality of occupational data is important but often neglected. We recoded open-ended questions on occupation for last and current job in the Dutch SHARE data, using the CASCOT ex-post coding software. The disagreement rate, defined as the percentage of observations coded differently in SHARE and CASCOT, is high even when compared at ISCO 1-digit level (33.7% for last job and 40% for current job). This finding is striking, considering our conservative approach to exclude vague and incomplete answers. The level of miscoding should thus be considered as a lower bound of the �true� miscoding. This highlights the complexity of occupational coding and suggests that measurement error due to miscoding should be taken into account when making statistical analysis or writing econometric models. We tested whether the measurement error is random or correlated to individual or job-related characteristics, and we found that the measurement error is indeed more evident in ISCO-88 groups 1 and 3 and is more pronounced for higher educated individuals and males. These groups may be sorted in occupations that are intrinsically more difficult to be classified, or education and gender may affect the way people describe their jobs.