Adult skills and labor market conditions during teenage years: Cross-country evidence from ALL and PIAAC

Marianne Haraldsvik () and Bjarne Strøm ()
Additional contact information
Marianne Haraldsvik: Department of Economics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Bjarne Strøm: Department of Economics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Abstract: Do individuals finishing compulsory school in economic downturns end up with higher skills in adulthood than comparable individuals that finish compulsory school in economic upturns? This paper answers this question by exploring data on country unemployment rates combined with individual data on educational attainment and adult skills in numeracy and literacy from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey (ALL). We find that completed education is countercyclical, and the same pattern is found for adult skills in numeracy and literacy. The results are fairly robust across different model specifications including fixed country and cohort effects and country specific cohort trends. The results indicates that the labor market conditions at the time when young people make crucial educational decisions have long lasting effect on skills and potential earnings in adulthood.

Keywords: Human capital accumulation; business cycles; adult skills (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 I2 J2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2020-04-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-eur, nep-lma and nep-mac
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.svt.ntnu.no/iso/WP/2020/3_20.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:nst:samfok:18520

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Larsen ().