Educational Intensity of Employment and Polarization in Europe and the US
Year: 2010
Type: preprint
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Recent work in the labour economics literature has focused on the polarisation of jobs as a source of growing income inequality in the US and some countries in Europe. The hypothesis is that the growth in employment and corresponding employment shares over the past decades has been in jobs at the low and high ends of the skill distribution, with declines in employment shares in the middle. The underlying distributions of jobs and skills, the educational intensity of employment, is the focus of the present paper. Using data from the EU-Survey of Income and Living Conditions, we present a descriptive analysis of the distributions of skills (measured by educational attainment) and employment shares for a sample of countries in the EU in 2007, and compare the results with the US. We also examine the extent to which demographic groups in Europe differ in their distributions of employment across the skill deciles, and provide preliminary evidence of changes in the educational intensity of employment over the 2004-2007 period. Our results indicate that the distributions of skills exhibit similar patterns with the US for a combined sample of countries in the EU, although there are different patterns found among the countries. We also find evidence of small changes in employment shares over time, consistent with the polarisation hypothesis.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Author: Donald R. Williams
Institution: Kent State University
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2286488188