Essays in labour economics

Abstract

This thesis combines three essays in applied labour economics. The first essay in Chapter 2 mainly investigates three questions: (i) How has wage dispersion within male university graduates changed from 1997 to 2012 in the UK? (ii) What type of tasks and skills do university graduates apply on the job? (iii) To what extent can increased wage dispersion within university graduates be attributed to changes in job tasks and skills used in the workplace? The results suggest that male university graduates who are on the 90th percentile of the wage distribution have become better off, whereas the status of the workers in this group who are on the 10th percentile has not shown significant increase from 1997 to 2012. In addition, they show that this dispersion can be partly attributed to job skills such as numeracy and problem search and solving skills.

The second essay in Chapter 3 examines one important education policy-related question: How large are the efficiency gains from early tracking for the students who are streamed? In order to answer this question, a policy change which created an exogenous variation in the early tracking status of the students in Turkey was evaluated. The results show there was an additional 13% decrease in the mathematics test scores during the post-intervention periods for the students who were exposed to the policy change, compared to the students who were not subjected to it.

The third essay in Chapter 4 assesses to what extent returns to cognitive and motor skills vary across occupations in the UK by employing the heterogeneous human capital framework of Yamaguchi (2014), who defines occupations as a bundle of cognitive and motor task indices. Using self-reported cognitive and motor task information from the Skills Survey of Britain, the cognitive and motor task complexity vectors of occupations are calculated. Further, the varying returns to skills across occupations are quantified exploiting data from the British Household Panel Survey between 1991 and 2008. The results imply that there are heterogeneous rewards to cognitive skills depending on the workers' performed level of cognitive task complexity in their jobs.

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ORCID for Michael Vlassopoulos: orcid.org/0000-0003-3683-1466

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