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The Schengen project is one of Europe’s most important accomplishments as it facilitates the free movement of goods and people. Currently, Romania and Bulgaria are on the verge of obtaining their Schengen membership and, to our knowledge, not enough emphasis has been placed on the emigration and labour market implications for aspiring candidates. This research aims to empirically evaluate the liaison between Schengen Area and labour migration. To achieve this objective, we construct a difference-in-differences research design using data from the European Labour Force Survey. The treatment is represented by the Schengen enlargement of 2007 with Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia constructing the treatment group and Romania and Bulgaria the control group. The main results show that Schengen Membership led to an increased probability of working abroad one year after treatment occurred, as well as three years after treatment occurred. Also, we can identify the demographic category most likely to emigrate as young males in search of seasonal full-time jobs

In many industrialised countries, including the Netherlands, the share of solo self-employed workers has strongly increased in recent years. This development is subject to a lot of public debate as it is feared that this increase is caused by ‘quasi’ self-employment. There still seems to be little consensus, however, on what constitutes ‘genuine’ self-employment and what not. In this article we present a theoretical framework for ‘quasi’ solo self-employment and discuss how the various indicators for ‘quasi’ self-employment that are used in the literature fit in this framework. We then compare the outcomes of different indicators by applying them to solo self-employed workers in the Netherlands. The data used for the analysis are taken from the Dutch Labour Force Survey (NL-LFS) 2017 complemented with the European Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) ad hoc module 2017 on self-employment. Our results show that about 7% of the solo self-employed workers is dependent on one client. Furthermore, almost 20% of all solo self-employed had an involuntary start. The correspondence between dependency and involuntariness is very low: less than 2% of the solo self-employed workers are both dependent and involuntary. Both dependency and voluntariness are related to the fiscal and legal status of the solo self-employed workers and to the type of work activities. Solo self-employed workers that own their own business and who mainly sell products are less likely to be dependent and/or involuntary self-employed compared to those who do not own a business and/or offer services. Dependency is hardly related to the unfavourable outcomes of solo self-employment. Involuntariness, on the contrary, seems to have some impact on outcomes. Those who became self-employed because they couldn’t find a job as an employee have a higher probability to be unsatisfied with their job, to have financial problems or problems due to a lack of work or a low income. Nevertheless even among the involuntary solo self-employed workers, the majority does not report negative outcomes.

This paper presents estimates of the level and trend of the fertility of different ethnic minorities in the UK from the 1960s up to 2006. The fertility estimates are derived primarily from the Labour Force Survey using the Own-Child method, with additional information from the General Household Survey and vital registration data. Comparisons are made between the level of fertility of UK-born and immigrant mothers from minority groups, and the fertility of the populations in the country of origin. Total fertility in all groups has fallen from levels that were initially relatively high. That of some UK ethnic groups has already fallen to about the level of the UK national average (e.g., black Caribbean) or below it (e.g., Indian and Chinese). Only among Pakistani and Bangladeshi women does total fertility remain substantially above the national average despite a continuous decrease over the last 20 years.

This study investigates the incidence of overeducation among graduate workers in 21 European Union countries and its underlying factors based on the European Labor Force Survey 2016. Although controlling for a wide range of covariates, the particular interest lies in the role of fields of study for vertical educational mismatch. The study reveals country differences in the impact of these factors. Compared to Social sciences, male graduates from, for example, Education, Health and welfare, Engineering, and ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) are less and those from Services and Natural sciences are more at risk in a clear majority of countries. These findings are robust against changes of the standard education. Moreover, some fields show gender-specific risks. We suggest that occupational closure, productivity signals and gender stereotypes answer for these cross-field and cross-country differentials. Moreover, country fixed effects point to relevant structural differences between national labor markets and between educational systems.

This study examines occupational licensing in the United States using a specially designed national labor force survey. Estimates from the survey indicated that 35% of employees were either licensed or certified by the government and that 29% were licensed. Another 3% stated that all who worked in their job would eventually be required to be certified or licensed, bringing the total that are or eventually must be licensed or certified by government to 38%. We find that licensing is associated with about 18% higher wages but that the effect of governmental certification on pay is much smaller.

We examine the trade-offs associated with using Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) interface for subject recruitment. We first describe MTurk and its promise as a vehicle for performing low-cost and easy-to-field experiments. We then assess the internal and external validity of experiments performed using MTurk, employing a framework that can be used to evaluate other subject pools. We first investigate the characteristics of samples drawn from the MTurk population. We show that respondents recruited in this manner are often more representative of the U.S. population than in-person convenience samples—the modal sample in published experimental political science—but less representative than subjects in Internet-based panels or national probability samples. Finally, we replicate important published experimental work using MTurk samples.

This paper examines gender differences in paid work over time and illustrates the pitfalls encountered by any comparative research that only considers either labor force participation rates or average working hours. To do so, we analyze harmonized survey data from Europe and the United States from 1992 to 2022 (N = 43,283,172) and show that more progress was made in closing gender gaps in labor force participation rates than in working hours. In most countries, women’s labor force participation rates increased considerably, but their average working hours decreased, whereas both men’s labor force participation rates and average working hours decreased or stagnated (but nonetheless still remained much higher than women’s). We show and argue that these countervailing trends in working hours and labor force participation rates make it difficult to paint a coherent picture of cross-national differences in women’s and men’s paid work and of changes over time. In response, we propose “work volume” as a supplementary or alternative measure for any type of comparative research. Work volume records zero working hours for nonemployed individuals and thus allows straightforward comparisons between women’s and men’s (or any other groups’) involvement in paid work. Using the proposed work volume measure, we show that gender gaps in paid work decreased over time, but that even in 2022, men’s involvement in paid work remained considerably higher than women’s—with gender gaps being lowest in the Scandinavian and the former Communist countries.

A new life cycle of women's employment emerged with cohorts born in the 1950s. For prior cohorts, life-cycle employment had a hump shape; it increased from the twenties to the forties, hit a peak, and then declined starting in the fifties. The new life cycle of employment is initially high and flat, there is a dip in the middle, and a phasing out that is more prolonged than for previous cohorts. The hump is gone, the middle is a bit sagging, and the top has greatly expanded. We explore the increase in cumulative work experience for women from the 1930s to the 1970s birth cohorts using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and the Health and Retirement Study. We investigate the changing labor force impact of a birth event across cohorts and by education, and also the impact of taking leave or quitting. We find greatly increased labor force experience across cohorts, far less time out after a birth, and greater labor force recovery for those who take paid or unpaid leave. Increased employment of women in their older ages is related to more continuous work experience across the life cycle.

Since the early 1990s Europe, like the United States and the United Kingdom, has experienced job polarization, that is, a disproportionate increase in high-paid and low-paid employment. Pervasive job polarization is in line with the evidence that in advanced countries, technologies are becoming more intense in the use of nonroutine tasks concentrated in high-paid and low-paid service jobs, at the expense of routine tasks concentrated in manufacturing and clerical work. The evidence for alternative explanations--offshoring and inequality--is much weaker.

The share of U.S. workers in alternative work arrangements has increased substantially in recent decades. Micro longitudinal analyses show that unemployed workers are much more likely to transition into alternative work arrangements than other workers. Macro time-series evidence shows that weak labor market conditions lead to an increase in non-traditional work. But the estimated magnitudes imply that the Great Recession and high unemployment in the 2000s can account for only a modest part of the rise in alternative work. Secular factors associated with rising inequality and technological changes making it easier to contract out work appear to be the driving forces.