Mechanisms for the effect of education on the labour market

The team aims to investigate why education pays off on the labour market. Theories on the relationship between education and labour market outcomes (e.g. employment, wages) are clustered into three groups/mechanisms: productive skills, positional good, and social closure. We aim to link the mechanisms to institutional settings and formulate conditions under which certain mechanisms are more likely to prevail. With that, our proposed research will not only compare mechanisms in their explanatory power, which has so far been the dominant way of studying the topic; it will also relate the education effect to institutional contexts and focus on the variations in the mechanisms why education pays off on the labour market. Furthermore, we will bridge cross-national and between-industry perspectives on institutions governing labour market behaviour. The innovative character of the project is this contextual way of studying the problem and the fact that we advance on existing theories about the role of education on the labour market.

EDUC projects are listed on the left hand side. For more information on specific projects click on the project titles in the blue boxes. The research results are presented in the State of the Art report (above) and the EDUC Research Papers: