Suchergebnisse

We analyze the effectiveness of a vocational training (VT) programme targeting unemployed youth in Latvia, contributing to the scant literature on active labour market policies in transition countries. The programme we analyse is part of the Youth Guarantee scheme (2014–2020), the largest action launched by the European Union to combat youth unemployment after the 2008 financial crisis. Although the programme was targeted to youths aged between 15 and 29, priority was given to those younger than 25 years of age. We exploit this eligibility rule in a fuzzy regression discontinuity design framework to estimate the impact of VT participation on the probability of being employed and gross monthly labour income at given dates after the training. Using rich administrative data, we find that the age priority rule increased programme participation for the youngest group by about 10 percentage points. However, participation in the programme did not lead to statistically significant positive effects in labour market outcomes. We argue that this result could be due to some specific characteristics of the programme, namely the voucher system (potentially inducing lock-in effects) and the type of training (classroom instead of on-the-job training). Moreover, the programme was targeted at ex-ante low-employable individuals (e.g. without vocational qualifications), a fact that is confirmed by our analysis of the characteristics of the population of compliers with the age priority rule.

Immigration has recently been at the centre of the political and economic agenda. Economists have studied extensively the impact of immigration on several economic and social indicators of host countries. The effect of immigration on innovation and technical change is, however, not much studied. The existing work on the effect of immigrants on innovation is generally limited to the role played by highly educated immigrants, generally immigrants with at least tertiary education, and is mostly focused on the US. Yet, although in anglosaxon countries skilled immigration is a sizeable phenomenon -- according to the Docquier and Marfouk (2006) data the percentages of tertiary educated immigrants were in 2001 40.3% for Australia, 58.8% for Canada, 34.9% for the UK, ad 42.7% for the US -- this is much less the case in European countries, for which just the minority of immigrants are skilled. Just to take a few figures, according to the same source, the percentages of tertiary-educated immigrants were 16.4% for France, 21.8% for Germany, 15.4% for Italy and 18.5% for Spain. Now, although the existing literature has emphasized why there are good reasons to expect positive effects of skilled immigrants on the innovation of the receiving countries, it has much less to say about the general effect of immigrants, or of low-educated immigrants. In this paper, we make an attempt to partly fill the gap concerning the effects of overall immigration on innovation, and in particular of low-skilled immigrants, existing in the literature. In addition to providing evidence for a country which was exposed to a very fast and large wave of immigration during the 2000s -- Italy --, and for which evidence is scant, we also use a very small geographical scale of analysis -- Italian provinces corresponding to NUTS-3 regions --, which presumably enables us to better control for differences in institutional and socio-economic factors which are difficult to observe but which may simultaneously contribute to both attracting new immigrants and to increasing the innovation potential of a region. More importantly, unlike most papers in the literature which only investigated the effect of skilled immigration, (i) we first focus on the general impact of immigration on innovation, and then (ii) separately look at the effects of low-educated and high-educated immigrants on innovation. Last but not least, we tackle potential endogeneity issues by using a well established instrumental variables (IVs, hereafter) strategy based on immigrants' enclaves.

A firm's export status may improve its ability to introduce product innovations (learning by exporting). We explore this idea using very rich firm-level data on Italian manufacturing, which enables us to control for many confounding factors in the exporting-product innovation link (i.e. selection on observable variables). We also make an attempt to address the potential self-selection of firms into exporting according to unobservable characteristics using an industry-province specific measure of firm distances from their most likely export markets, and of these export markets' potentials as sources of presumably exogenous variations in export status using an instrumental variables strategy. We find that export status significantly increases the likelihood of introducing product innovations and that this effect is not fully captured by the channels commonly stressed by the theoretical literature, such as larger markets (and accordingly firm size) or higher investments in R&D. We argue that heterogeneity in foreign customers' tastes and needs may explain our findings. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

This paper analyzes the effect of delayed motherhood on fertility dynamics for women living in several European countries, which differ in terms of their institutional environments. We show that the effect of delaying the first child on the transition to the second birth differs both among working and non-working women and across countries. For non-working women delayed motherhood leads to a postponement effect which is higher in countries where religion and social norms determine a relative larger stigma effect for giving birth late. For working women, delaying the first birth raises the likelihood of progressing to the second parity due to an income effect, which is larger in countries with high childcare provision and part-time employment opportunities. We show that the overall effect of delayed motherhood depends on these two opposite forces, which are determined by the institutional environment.