Education and labour force

Abstract This paper documents “sharp retirement”—retirement accompanied by a discontinuous decline in labor supply—across three data sets, which previous literature found difficult to explain. I propose and estimate a life-cycle labor supply model with habit persistence wherein sharp retirement can be explained by workers quitting “cold turkey.” In much the same way that one might quit smoking, workers with accumulated “working habit” exit the labor force with a pronounced, discontinuous decline in labor supply. The working habit model is consistent with the data, where workers reduce yearly labor supply by scaling back more in hours worked per week (over 50% reduction) than in weeks worked per year (20% reduction). The fixed costs approach, which has been the standard model used to understand sharp retirement, cannot explain these trends. After estimating the model, counterfactuals show that reducing Social Security benefits by 20% causes individuals work an additional 8.6 months. Individuals choosing sharp retirement respond mostly on the extensive margin by delaying retirement eight months, while individuals choosing smooth retirement respond mostly on the intensive margin by increasing yearly labor supply and delaying retirement only one month.

In recent decades, skilled and professional human resources are key elements of production as well as economic development. Since, institutions of higher education in each country are among the main gateways of labor market, Human capital formation requires improvement and investment in higher education as central part of the human capital production. Hence, development of higher education in a country can plan accelerate of business succeeds and economic development through highly trained and skilled. In the decades after revolution of Iran, Higher education has been encountered (experienced) different challenges. One of these challenges is the social demand for higher education that is closely associated to changes in population structure. The main goal of this paper is to find out how the demographic transitions affect social demand for higher education in the post-revolution period.
In order to reach this goal, first, we studied the changes in social demand for higher education based on information of the national education assessment in 1983-2012, then the impact of demographic changes on development of higher education demand was investigated. After that, using the demographic projections of future changes in the social demand for higher education was explored in terms of demography.

This paper focuses on education as the most important human capital endowment and presents research-based evidence to examine the association between migration, religion and education from an economic and socio-demographic perspective. Since migrants’ status in the labour market operates as an essential indication of settlement and integration upon migration, this analysis examines the association through migrants’ work patterns. The field of this study is the multiethnic and multicultural context of Australia holding a wide range of ethnic and religious groups of migrants from throughout the world. According to both bivariate and multivariate findings of this analysis, educational attainment as an important human capital plays a substantial role in migrants’ work achievements. However, the economic return of education is significantly associated with migration status, religious affiliation, and ethnic backgrounds of migrants.

This paper clarifies that the development of education will not certainly promote the economic development by analyzing the situation in China.
As the development of education can enhance human capital and then raise the labor productivity, people usually take it for granted that education progress will lead to economic growth. Though it is true that human capital can be improved by education, the development of education doesn’t equal to more human capital or higher labor productivity. The education structure should be taken into account when analyzing how much human capital has been improved. China’s potential human capital has been increasing because of the development of education, but it can hardly turn into real human capital. This is because the education structure of China mismatches economic structure. Though the graduates have learned a lot in universities, they can hardly put what they’ve learned in use. A lot of potential human capital has been wasted and China’s labor productivity is still low.
In China, the development of education has not contributed much to the economic development, which may redirect collective consciousness. It also alerts us to the fact that only when education structure matches economic structure, can it promote economic development.

One major hurdle for the Brazilian economy relates to the availability of qualified workforce in key occupations. This paper contributes in this matter presenting a demographic projection of engineering workforce availability in Brazil up to 2020.
The projection method we have used adapts the cohort-component method to a simplified model of entries and exits in the labor market. Data from five different public databases available in Brazil were used to run the projections on yearly basis. The method is rather flexible and can be used to project almost any population group with higher education degree from different backgrounds, by sex and age. We draw four scenarios that differ in terms of possible growth rates to be observed in the number of student entries, including a constant enrollment number (CER) variant.
The results suggest that Brazilian labor market would have between 1.6 and 2.3 million people holding a degree in engineering fields in the year 2020. Finally, our findings suggest that the claimed lack of engineering workforce in the country might not be a matter of purely quantitative supply, but rather of education quality and geographical concentration of engineering schools and engineering workforce.

The geographic distribution of Mexican highly qualified labor force, its expression in forms of specialization, diversification or complementarity and their impact in the performance of cities are relevant issues, from a public policy and an academic point of view. For the analysis of the geographic distribution of human capital (hc) in Mexico we depart from a functional structure derived by the interactions of 56 cities placed in 16 regional networks. We approach these as labor markets and people engaged in knowledge-intensive (ki) occupations as part of their high-level hc. We classify cities and networks by the relevance of their ki occupation structure in three types: balanced hubs, specialized hubs and emergent specialization. We also approach hc accumulation in terms of educational achievement and its evolution overtime and classify cities as outstanding, at risk, pre-emergent and deteriorated. We find that, as aggregates, diversified hubs are an ‘at a risk’ position, specialized hubs of cities show an emergent outstanding position but the corresponding networks are ‘at risk’; and the emerging aggregate with the greater shortage of highly educated hc, show a great dynamism in its formation. We finally analyze the association of these types with indicators of social and economic performance of these urban areas

In almost all developed countries, girls and boys have an equal access to education and seem free to choose their educational field. However, educational choices are highly gendered, and partly remain a mystery according to an economist. Girls choose more fields leading to low-paid jobs et less prestigious careers, while they perform as well as boys at school. In this paper, I test the presence of non-monetary payoff affecting educational choices, as stereotypes and social norms. Particularly, I investigate if grades influence differently girls and boys' choices, and I test the assumption that girls are more influenced by their humanity grades, while boys decide more according to science grades. I use the French pupils panel (Panel d'élèves du second degré 1995-2011), and I concentrate on field choice after Baccalaureat (at eighteen). First results show that students make educational choices according to their grades. However, gender differences appear and are in accordance with the stereotype: girls have a lower probability to choose science, even if they are talented in science.

The promotion of education later in life has become a key issue in policy discourses, both with regard to strengthening economic competitiveness and to reducing social inequalities in a context of aging societies. However, country differences in participation patterns are less understood yet. The majority of available analysis are single country studies and focus only on individual factors influencing enrolment, while country-specific factors are barely taken into account. We contribute to this research area by offering a more comprehensive overview about different determinants of education later in life. Firstly, we distinguish between four different adult education activities and can therefore offer a more detailed distinction of education later in life. Secondly, we examine up to 26 European countries, and thus include more cases than most papers have done before, with the most recent data available on this topic, the European Adult Education Survey from 2007. Thirdly, we apply multilevel analysis to test for each of the four adult education activities separately theoretically important country-specific determinants that are welfare, labour market and educational characteristics as well as economic indicators.

The current belief in our society is that teaching is an easy job and their role is quite simple having no complexities, tension and conflicts. This widely prevalent belief is incorrect for the outsider’s perception of the role of women teachers. Therefore a study was done in order to discover the stress level of women teachers and the factors that lead to stress and its related illness in Chennai city, India. The primary data was collected through schedules with the sample size of 100. Based on the help of percentage it is found that the stress level of teaching community is more i.e., 47% is very or extremely stressed. The increasing workload on teachers, distance and mode of travel, less remuneration and an increasing number of pupils behaving in an unacceptable ways are some of the trends identified as leading to a rise in stress and its related illnesses. The number of teachers using Antidepressants and sleeping pills is identified as 28%. These facts threaten the upcoming generation which may demolish the teaching profession. The study also suggests stress management technique and helps us to create awareness among the teaching union for betterment of teaching environment.

Websites are today the face of an organization in the virtual world, with a global reach. Universities are organizations in India offering higher education. They use their websites for digital equality in education. The Information and Technology (IT) Act 2000 of India, is silent on the subject of Digital inequality of its educable population. However, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) guidelines, which has been ratified by Govt. of India, in 2007 of which Article 9.2 (g) & (h) lays down that, states should facilitate digital equality for Persons with disabilities (PWDs) for education, for new information and communication technologies, especially the Internet. One of the aims of National Assessment and Accreditation Council’s (NAAC) is to assess and accredit institutions of higher education in the country and lay special emphasis on upholding the quality of higher education in India. The websites of 137 Central and State Universities with NAAC accreditation were used for the study. The study aimed at evaluating the websites in terms of digital inequality in education, digital equality, career opportunities and interactive features for student population with disabilities. The study showed significant differences of digital equality features in their websites.