Arbeitspapier

Wages and Employment: The Role of Occupational Skills

How skills acquired in vocational education and training (VET) affect wages and employment is not clear. We develop and estimate a search and matching model for workers with a VET degree. Workers differ in interpersonal, cognitive and manual skills, while firms require and value different combinations of these skills. Assuming that match productivity exhibits worker-job complementarity, we estimate how interpersonal, cognitive and manual skills map into job offers, unemployment and wages. We find that firms value cognitive skills on average almost twice as much as interpersonal and manual skills, and they prize complementarity in cognitive and interpersonal skills. The average return to VET skills in hourly wages is 9%, similar to the returns to schooling. Furthermore, VET appears to improve labour market opportunities through higher job arrival rate and lower job destruction. Workers thus have large benefits from acquiring a VET degree.

Sprache
Englisch

Erschienen in
Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 11586

Klassifikation
Wirtschaft
Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
Labor Demand
Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search
Thema
occupational training
vocational education
labor market search
sorting
multidimensional skills

Ereignis
Geistige Schöpfung
(wer)
Girsberger, Esther Mirjam
Rinawi, Miriam
Krapf, Matthias
Ereignis
Veröffentlichung
(wer)
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
(wo)
Bonn
(wann)
2018

Handle
Letzte Aktualisierung
10.03.2025, 11:42 MEZ

Datenpartner

Dieses Objekt wird bereitgestellt von:
ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. Bei Fragen zum Objekt wenden Sie sich bitte an den Datenpartner.

Objekttyp

  • Arbeitspapier

Beteiligte

  • Girsberger, Esther Mirjam
  • Rinawi, Miriam
  • Krapf, Matthias
  • Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Entstanden

  • 2018

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