Education expansion and high-skill job opportunities for workers: Does a rising tide lift all boats?

Tobias Schultheiss, Curdin Pfister, Ann-Sophie Gnehm and Uschi Backes-Gellner
Additional contact information
Ann-Sophie Gnehm: University of Zurich

No 154, Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW)

Abstract: We examine how education expansions affect the job opportunities for workers with and without the new education. To identify causal effects, we exploit a quasi-random establishment of Universities of Applied Sciences (UASs), bachelor-granting three-year colleges that teach and conduct applied research. By applying machine-learning methods to job advertisement data, we analyze job content before and after the education expansion. We find that, in regions with the newly established UASs, not only job descriptions of the new UAS graduates but also job descriptions of workers without this degree (i.e., middle-skilled workers with vocational training) contain more high-skill job content. This upskilling in job content is driven by an increase in high-skill R&D-related tasks and linked to employment and wage gains. The task spillovers likely occur because UAS graduates with applied research skills build a bridge between middle-skilled workers and traditional university graduates, facilitating the integration of the former into R&D-related tasks.

JEL-codes: I23 J23 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 67 pages
Date: 2018-07, Revised 2022-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-eur and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.business.uzh.ch/RePEc/iso/leadinghouse/0154_lhwpaper.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Education expansion and high-skill job opportunities for workers: Does a rising tide lift all boats? (2023)
Working Paper: Education Expansion and High-Skill Job Opportunities for Workers: Does a Rising Tide Lift All Boats? (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iso:educat:0154

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sara Brunner ().