Higher Education Non-Completion, Employers, and Labor Market Integration: Experimental Evidence

Martin Neugebauer and Annabell Daniel

No evm74, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Theories of job assignment suggest that employers give a lot of weight to achieved educational credentials. But what if credentials are missing? We theorize how college non-completion affects the hiring chances, identify its causal effect in different labor market segments, and assess which factors facilitate labor market entry for dropouts. Based on a simulated hiring process with N = 1,382 German employers who rated more than 10,000 fictitious CVs, we show that college non-completion is not a scar per se, but rather depends on the educational attainment of the competitors who constitute the labor queue, and on the degree of occupational closure which varies on a granular level between firms that hire for the same occupations. We also find that employers, when rating dropouts, attach most value to CV attributes that signal a high stock of job-relevant skills, such as good performance during college or an occupation-specific internship. We conclude by discussing implications of our work for research on the labor market integration of dropouts.

Date: 2021-10-19
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/616eacf02048df004f6ba080/

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:osf:socarx:evm74

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/evm74

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().