Wouter Zwysen

Employment and earning differences in the early career of ethnic minority British graduates: the importance of university career, parental background and area characteristics

ABSTRACT Ethnic minorities in the U.K. are more likely than the white majority to gain university qualifications, but experience worse labour market outcomes on average. This paper compares employment and earnings of British graduates from ethnic minorities to those of white British graduates to analyse whether ethnic labour market differences exist among the highly qualified, and whether they can be explained by differences in parental background, local area characteristics or differences in university careers. These factors account for a substantial part of persistent ethnic differences in earnings, but explain very little of the differences in employment. Compared to the literature estimating ethnic labour market inequalities on people with any level of qualification, we find smaller ethnic differences in employment and almost no differences in earnings among graduates entering the labour market. The results are robust to various changes in model specification.

The effects of father’s worklessness on young adults in the UK

Using the United Kingdom household longitudinal study (UKHLS), this paper shows the effect of experiencing a father being out of work on a range of labour market outcomes as young adults. Children of non-working fathers work less and are less satisfied while working despite similar wages and contract types. A sensitivity analysis shows that this effect of father’s worklessness is robust to the inclusion of strong unobserved confounders, indicating non-spuriousness. Support is found for the idea that young adults who grew up experiencing their father’s worklessness develop a different, less negative attitude, towards being out of work.JEL codesJ620, J640, J30

A Disadvantaged Childhood Matters More If Local Unemployment is High

Using multilevel models on the German Socio-Economic Panel Study this paper shows that disadvantaged young adults (16-35 years old) are more affected by the business cycle than their similarly educated counterparts from more advantaged backgrounds. We propose that a disadvantaged background lowers desirability on the labour market, which matters more to employers as the labour market tightens. When the local unemployment rate is high, young adults from a disadvantaged background are less likely to be hired for good jobs or hired at all than their more advantaged counterparts. These results are robust to different operationalisations and sibling fixed effects.

The effect of computer use on job quality

This paper studies changes in computer use and job quality in the EU-15 between 1995 and 2015. We document that while the proportion of workers using computers has increased from 40% to more than 60% over twenty years, there remain significant differences between countries even within the same occupations. Several countries have seen a significant increase in computer use even in low-skilled occupations generally assumed to be less affected by technology. Overall, the great increase in computer use between 1995 and 2015 has coincided with a period of modest deterioration of job quality in the EU-15 as whole, as discretion declined for most occupational and educational groups while intensity increased slightly for most of them. Our OLS results that exploit variation within country-occupation cells point to a sizeable positive effect of computer use on discretion, but to small or no effect on intensity at work. Our instrumental variable estimates point to an even more benign effect of computer use on job quality. Hence, the results suggest that the (moderate) deterioration in the quality of work observed in the EU-15 between 1995 and 2015 has occurred despite the spread of computers, rather than because of them.

Different patterns of labour market integration by migration motivation in Europe: the role of host country human capital

We study whether the acquisition of host country human capital, such as obtaining equivalent qualifications, good language skills, or naturalization, explains differences in labor market integration between migrants depending on their initial motivation. We use cross-national European data from the 2008 ad hoc module of the Labour Force Survey to analyze migrant gaps in labor market participation, employment, occupational status, and precarious employment. We find that different rates of and returns to host country human capital explain a substantial part of the improvements in labor market outcomes with years of residence, particularly for noneconomic migrants who experience faster growth on average.