Education and the labour market

Ehrenfried, Felix (2020): Education and the labour market: empirical essays on enrolment decisions and the search for workers. Dissertation, LMU München: Volkswirtschaftliche Fakultät

Abstract

Chapter I: The introduction of tuition fees in Germany can be used as a quasi-experimental setting to study the manifold effects of such fees. I investigate migration patterns of students in reaction to the introduction and abolishment of those fees. By employing a Difference-in-Differences approach, I find small but significant effects of tuition fees on migration patterns if countries are neighbouring. Interestingly, an introduction and following abolishment of fees seem to have negative effects on the external enrolment of first year students. Posing the question whether students avoid paying fees by delaying enrolment decisions until tuition fees are abolished again does not lead to significant effects which could be clarified by a dataset with a higher sampling frequency, however. Chapter II: The question how spatial mobility for jobs pays out monetarily is a prevalent issue in economic research. In this paper, we take one step back and raise the question what determines the mobility of people in their working life. Therefore, we take a representative sample of Bavarian university graduates and track their mobility patterns back to their high school times. The distance to the nearest university will be applied as an instrumental variable on the decision whether to move when going to the university or enrolling at an university nearby. Taking a subset of graduates who went to a suburban high school close to a city with university makes the distance exogenous, given a broad set of controls. We find that people who move to study exhibit a significantly higher likelihood to change location after graduation from university. These results stay robust against personal and socio-economic controls from the survey and add to the literature by arguing that job-mobility is rooted in mobility patterns when starting university education. Chapter III: We use detailed German data to carefully document how the vacancy-filling hazard evolves from the recruiting firms’ perspectives. We further show how firms adjust their search behaviour when they are unable to fill their vacancy within the planned search duration. We find that the vacancy filling hazard is increasing during the planned search period and that it decreases thereafter. Most applicants arrive early in the recruitment process. Firms’ willingness to pay higher wages or to hire less qualified, inexperienced or unemployed applicants increases when they are unable to hire before the intended starting date. Models of random search, directed search, and stock-flow matching differ substantially in the way they assume that job seekers and firms behave during the recruitment process in these respects and we conjecture that our findings are most readily explained by stock-flow matching models - if these were amended by time-consuming screening technologies.

• Dokumententyp: Dissertationen (Dissertation, LMU München)
• Themengebiete: 300 Sozialwissenschaften ; 300 Sozialwissenschaften > 330 Economics
• Fakultäten: Volkswirtschaftliche Fakultät
• Sprache der Hochschulschrift: Englisch
• Datum der mündlichen Prüfung: 21. Januar 2020
• 1. Bericht­erstatter:in: Holzner, Christian