Duco De Vos (p), Evert Meijers, Maarten Van Ham, Urban Lindgren

Hildegunn Stokke

Wages are higher in cities, because of sorting of firms and people, but also because of assortative matching: in cities there tends to be a higher correlation between worker- and firm quality. Over the last decades various scholars have investigated to what extent advances in digital technology complement or substitute agglomeration economies. These studies focused on the effects on product variety, and the importance of face-to-face contact, but the effects of information technology on labour market matching have been ignored. Our hypothesis is that information technologies such as high-speed broadband-, and wireless 3g internet may have spurred the quality of matches on the labour market, especially for areas near large population centres. We will use data from the linked employer-employee data from the Swedish Population Register together with broadband internet penetration data, over the years 2007-2016, to test this hypothesis.

Marten Middeldorp (p), Anet Weterings (p)

Duco de Vos

In this paper, we address the question of the extent to which early career employment security is determined by the match between education and the local labour market. We use sequence analysis to measure development of employment security during the early careers of Dutch entrants in the years 2006-2009. We then define an accessibility index based on the density of jobs related to a particular educational field, and the density of entrants for whom the jobs are related to their educational field. We find that thickness of the local labour market for skills from an educational field increases the probability that school-leavers from that field are able to develop early career employment security.

Jorn Rattso , Hildegunn Stokke (p)

Marten Middeldorp

We estimate the dynamic private-public wage gap based on sectoral returns to experience. The analysis applies Norwegian register data observing work experience of individuals by sector. Selection is handled with controls for observable and unobservable worker characteristics and experience is instrumented using the Altonji-Shakotko method. The dynamic experience effect adds to the static private wage premium for high-educated workers and counts for 2/3 of the total wage gap. Low educated gain less from shifting to the private sector and have no additional gain from experience. Both static and dynamic gains from shifting to the private sector are higher in cities.