Britain has lagged behind the G7 countries in labour productivity in recent years. There is also an emerging concern about a potential post-Brexit skills deficit. Upskilling the existing workforce via on-the-job training may be a vital policy tool available. Using a panel of organisations and their 'Investors in People' accreditation status, this paper empirically examines if accreditation promotes upskilling. Fixed effects [FE estimates reveal that accreditation enhances on-the-job training but only in private sector organisations. Difference-in-differences estimates using unaccredited and di-accredited organisations as alternative matched comparators reinforce the FE findings. Policy may have to further engender accreditation schemes that boost worker upskilling to address the productivity concerns and to cope with the rapid technological changes better.

This paper studies the relationship between changes in occupational employment, occupational wages, and rising overall wage inequality. Using long-running administrative panel data with detailed occupation codes, we first document that in all occupations, entrants and leavers earn lower wages than stayers. This empirical fact suggests substantial skill selection effects that are negative for growing occupations and positive for shrinking ones. We develop and estimate a model for prices paid per unit of skill in occupations, which incorporates occupation-specific skill accumulation over the career and endogenous switching across many occupations. Our results shed light on two important puzzles in prior literature. First, consistent with leading explanations for occupational employment changes, price and employment growth are positively related. Strong counteracting skill changes along the lines of our new empirical fact explain why occupational wages are unrelated to employment growth. Second, skill prices establish a long-suspected quantitative connection between occupational changes and the surge in wage inequality.

Only a small share of employers in high-wage locations procure services from abroad. We document heterogeneous employer adoption of an online labor market that facilitates trade in tasks with global workers. Job vacancies posted by experienced employers who have adopted the market are twice as likely to be filled, and this difference is unrelated to the set of available job applicants or their wages. Instead, hiring demand from experienced employers shifts outward for two reasons that we identify using exogenous variation in workers' wage bids. First, their value for hiring in the market increases - a form of learning-by-doing. Second, experienced employers omit the low-value employers who leave the market. Employers appear to learn their value for online hiring only by trying it out, and new employers' adoption decisions are relatively insensitive to wage rates. Larger firms have lower estimated values for the market. The results suggest that employers' willingness to fragment and outsource production at the task level, rather than the quality of the available online workforce, limits the growth of the gig economy.

Population ageing poses stark dilemmas for labour markets, social protection systems and cultural norms. It will put strong downward pressure on labour supply, leading to falling real incomes and huge financial pressures on social protection systems unless there is an offsetting increase in employment rates. This is especially true for older workers whose employment rates are well below those of prime-age adults. In this paper, I examine how the labour market for older workers has evolved in OECD countries since 1990, what are the main forces at work, what are the main obstacles to working longer and how might public policies help overcome them. I also speculate about the future for older workers faced with the challenges and opportunities posed by the gig economy.

Does over-education assist or hinder occupational advancement? Career mobility theory hypothesizes that over-education leads to a higher level of occupational advancement and wage growth over time, with mixed international empirical evidence. This paper re-tests career mobility theory directly using a rich Australian longitudinal data set. A dynamic random effects probit model is employed to examine upward occupational mobility, considering two-digit occupational rank advancement and wage growth over three-year intervals. The Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia data across nine years are employed, and a Mundlak correction model is adopted to adjust for unobserved heterogeneity effects and potential endogeneity, both of which are important to over-education analysis. Contrary to career theory, the results point to job mismatch as an economic concern rather than a passing phase, regardless of whether or not workers are skill-matched. Results further show the importance of adjusting for endogeneity.

We analyze a German labor market program that subsidizes skill-upgrading occupational training for workers employed in small and medium sized enterprises. This WeGebAU program reimburses training costs but take-up has been low. In an experimental setup, we mailed 10,000 brochures to potentially eligible workers, informing them about the importance of skill-upgrading occupational training in general and about WeGebAU in particular. Using combined survey and register data, we analyze the impact of receiving the brochure on workers' awareness of the program, on take-up of WeGebAU and other training, and on job characteristics. The survey data reveal that the brochure more than doubled workers' awareness of the program. We do not find effects on WeGebAU program take-up or short-run labor market outcomes in the register data. However, the information treatment positively affected participation in other (unsubsidized) training among employees under 45 years.

While education levels of women have increased dramatically relative to men, women are still greatly underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) college programmes. We use unique data on preference rankings for all secondary school students who apply for college in Ireland and detailed information on school subjects and grades to decompose the sources of the gender gap in STEM. We find that, of the 22 percentage points raw gap, about 13 percentage points is explained by differential subject choices and grades in secondary school. Subject choices are more important than grades - we estimate male comparative advantage in STEM (as measured by subject grades) explains about 3 percentage points of the gender gap. Additionally, differences in overall achievement between girls and boys have a negligible effect. Strikingly, there remains a gender gap of 9 percentage points even for persons who have identical preparation at the end of secondary schooling (in terms of both subjects studied and grades achieved); however, this gap is only 4 percentage points for STEM-ready students. We find that gender gaps are smaller among high-achieving students and for students who go to school in more affluent areas. There is no gender gap in science (the large gaps are in engineering and technology), and we also find a smaller gender gap when we include nursing degrees in STEM, showing that the definition of STEM used is an important determinant of the conclusions reached.

This paper studies whether individuals tend to migrate to countries where their skills are scarce or abundant. Focusing on English language skills, we test whether immigrants who are proficient in English choose to move to countries where many or few individuals speak English. We use the introduction of English classes into compulsory school curricula as an exogenous determinant for English proficiency of migrants of different ages, and we consider cohort data on migration among 29 European countries, where English is not the official language and where labor mobility is essentially free. Our estimation strategy consists of refined comparisons of cohorts, and we control for all variables traditionally included in international migration models. We find that immigrants who are proficient in English move to countries where fewer individuals speak English, and where hence their skills are scarce. We also show that similar results hold for general skills.

This paper aims to provide a critical overview of the drivers that the relevant theoretical and empirical literature suggests being crucial in dealing with the challenges an emerging country may encounter in its attempts to further catch-up a higher income status, with a particular focus devoted to the implications for the domestic labor market. In the first part of the paper, attention will be focused on structural change, capability building and technological progress, trying to map - using different taxonomies put forward by the innovation literature - the concrete ways through which an emerging country can engage a successful catching-up, having in mind that developing countries are deeply involved into globalized markets where domestic innovation has to be complemented by the role played by international technology transfer. In the second part of the paper, the focus will be moved to the possible consequences of this road to catching-up in terms of employment and skills. In particular, the prescriptions by the conventional trade theory will be contrasted with a view taking into account technology transfer, labor-saving technological progress and skill-enhancing trade.