Academic literature on the topic 'Early career, labour market, inequality, sequence analysis'

PurposeThis paper analyses how the employment histories of cohorts born after World War II in Germany have changed. A specific focus is on the role of atypical employment in this context.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses data from the adult cohort of the National Educational Panel Study and presents descriptive evidence on employment patterns for different cohorts. In addition, a sequence analysis of employment trajectories illustrates key aspects related to the opportunities and risks of atypical employment.FindingsYounger cohorts are characterised by acquiring more education, by entering into employment at a higher age and by experiencing atypical employment more often. The latter is associated with much higher employment of women for younger cohorts. The sequence analysis reveals that the proportion of individuals whose entry into the labour market is almost exclusively characterised by atypical employment rises significantly across the cohorts. Moreover, a substantial part of the increase in atypical employment is due to the increased participation of women, with part-time jobs or mini-jobs playing an important role in re-entering the labour market after career breaks.Originality/valueThe most important contribution of this article to the existing literature lies in the life course perspective taken for different birth cohorts. The findings are of great interest to the general debate about the success of the German labour market in recent decades and its implications for individual labour-market histories, but also about rising income inequality at about the same time.

This study examines the intergenerational transmission of family resources (class, education and income) on people’s educational and occupational attainment in their early career life. It asks whether parental resources remain effective or fall into insignificance. It also asks whether the resources operate in a similar way for the ethnic minorities as for the majority. Drawing on data from the Longitudinal Study of Young Persons in England, the study focuses on resource transmission in degree attainment, access to elite class position, unemployment rates, labour market earnings, and continuous income. In each aspect, we test not only the net effects of parental resources, but also the differential transmission between the majority and ethnic minority groups. The analysis shows strong effects of parental resources on educational and occupational attainment for whites but rather weak effects for the ethnic minorities. Ethnic minority children tend to grow up in poor families, yet even those whose parents manage to achieve socio-economic parity with whites do not enjoy similar benefits. Reducing inequality in family socio-economic conditions and inequality in labour market opportunities is key to achieving social justice.

Abstract Unemployment periods and other career breaks have long-term scarring effects on future labour market possibilities, permanently affecting workers' retirement income and standard of living as pensioners. Previous literature has focused on the impact of job loss on working careers with little attention to its impact on pension wealth, particularly the extent to which longevity heterogeneity amplifies unemployment scars. This paper investigates the effect of single and multiple unemployment spells on the lifetime pension entitlements of earnings-related contributory pension schemes, considering the timing and duration of breaks, alternative lifecycle labour earnings profiles, scarring and restoration effects on labour market re-entry, the existence of pension credits and pension accruals for periods spent outside the labour market, longevity heterogeneity, and the accumulation and decumulation redistributive features of the pension scheme. Pension entitlements are estimated using a backward-looking simulation approach based on the actual Portuguese public pension system rules and stylized labour market profiles identified in the SHARE Job Episodes Panel data using a sequence analysis. Longevity heterogeneity is modelled using a stochastic mortality model with a frailty model. Our results show that the timing and duration of unemployment periods is critical, that scarring effects amplify pension wealth losses, that minimum pension provisions, pension credits and pension scheme redistributive features can partially mitigate the impact of unemployment periods on future entitlements, and that the presence of positive correlation between lifetime income and longevity career breaks can amplify the asymmetry in the distribution of pension entitlements across income groups.

PurposeThe aim of the research is to estimate the level of the early career gender wage gap in Russia, its evolution during the early stages of a career, gender segregation and discrimination among university graduates, and to identify factors which explain early career gender differences in pay. Special emphasis is placed on assessing the contribution of horizontal segregation (inequal gender distribution in fields of studies and industries of employment) to early-career gender inequality.Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on a comprehensive and nationally representative survey of university graduates, carried out by Russian Federal State Statistics Service in 2016 (VTR Rosstat). The authors use Mincer OLS regressions for the analysis of the determinants of gender differences in pay. To explain the factors which form the gender gap, the authors use the Oaxaca-Blinder and Neumark gender gap decompositions, including detailed wage gap decompositions and decompositions by fields of study. For the analysis of differences in gender gap across wage distribution, quantile regressions and quantile decompositions based on recentered influence functions (RIFs) are used.FindingsThe study found significant gender differences in the early-career salaries of university graduates. Regression analysis confirms the presence of a 20% early-career gender wage gap. This gender wage gap is to a great extent can be explained by horizontal segregation: women are concentrated in fields of study and industries which are relatively low paid. More than half of the gender gap remains unexplained. The analysis of the evolution of the gender wage gap shows that it appears right after graduation and increases over time. A quantile decomposition reveals that, in low paid jobs, females experience less gender inequality than in better paid jobs.Social implicationsThe analysis has some important policy implications. Previously, gender equality policies were mainly related to the elimination of gender discrimination at work, including positive discrimination programs in a selection of candidates to job openings and programs of promotion; programs which ease women labour force participation through flexible jobs; programs of human capital accumulation, which implied gender equality in access to higher education and encouraged women to get higher education, which was especially relevant for many developing countries. The analysis of Russia, a country with gender equality in access to higher education, shows that the early career gender gap exists right after graduation, and the main explanatory factor is gender segregation by field of study and industry, in other words, the gender wage gap to a high extent is related to self-selection of women in low-paid fields of study. To address this, new policies related to gender inequality in choice of fields of studies are needed.Originality/valueIt has been frequently stated that gender inequality appears either due to inequality in access to higher education or after maternity leave. Using large nationally representative dataset on university graduates, we show that gender equality in education does not necessarily lead to gender equality in the labour market. Unlike many studies, we show that the gender gap in Russia appears not after maternity leave and due to marital decisions of women, but in the earliest stages of their career, right after graduation, due to horizontal segregation (selection of women in relatively low-paid fields of study and consequently industries).

Over the past decade, labour market flexibilization has become a major issue within the European Union, but the impact of deregulation and flexibilization processes and structural changes of labour systems on careers are still unclear. Job (dis)continuity and career configuration are crucial for understanding inequalities within the labour market and their evolution over time. The debate focuses, on the one hand, on the role of temporary contracts in trapping workers in precarious situations rather than in being a stepping-stone toward a stable job, and, on the other hand on increasing instability of employment careers and of career heterogeneity across the population. However, in order to detect vulnerable profiles of workers, it would be conducive to consider not just isolated transition between states and their timing but rather the complete pathways of labour market participation, conceived as a series of different labour market states and events succeeding over time. Moreover, it is just by adopting this approach that processes hypothesized as being triggered by globalization – like differentiation and destandardization of the working life – can be tested. Early careers represent a crucial step through labour market participation, since in this time-span the foundations for the following trajectories are laid and stronger or weaker within or between-groups differences with respect to a multitude of factors can influence different kinds of inequalities. The objects of this dissertation is precisely early careers patterns and their characteristics. The analyses are carried out using the new AD-Silc panel, that matches information from the National Institute for Social Security registers (INPS) and data from the 2005 wave of the Italian survey IT-Silc (part of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions – EU-Silc). Analyses concern four Italian cohorts of workers by considering if and to what extent gender and education are associated with different levels of differentiation and destandardization over time. Both synthetic indeces and ‘qualitative’ representative sequences will be used in order to study in depth individual pathways by highlighting different faces of the same processes in cross-cohort comparison. In fact, the first seven years of labour market participation of four different cohorts of entry (1974-1978, 1982-1986, 1990-1994, and 1998-2001) are defined as sequences and these will be my main object of study being analyzed as a whole in their temporal unfolding. I then analyze the cross-cohort evolution of the most frequent pathways leading to more or less positive/negative outcomes for labour market participation, such as being in full-time jobs and being jobless. Secondly, a focus on the younger cohort of entry (1998-2001) offers a broad description of the models of labour market participation that were at young workers disposal. The aim is to put in evidence to what extent gender and education and their interaction play a role in defining the likelihood of experiencing different models of labour market participation. The main results from the cross-cohort comparison confirm that an increase in dif- ferentiation and destandardization of early careers exists both for women and men, but to different extents, being more pronounced for women. Moreover, education strongly influences the degree to which each of these processes have evolved across cohorts, both for men and women. This also applies to the evolution over time of the representative sequences’ characteristics. This analytical step also shows that non-linear and disrupted early careers were already widely diffuse before the deregulation process started. Fur- thermore, the overall trend followed by the cross-cohort evolution of the most frequent pathways leading to full-time employment and joblessness show a general increase in the length of the pathways and a progressively stronger presence of more differentiated states. Differences according to education exist and they support the idea that the higher the educational level is, the less differentiated and complex the patterns. Finally, the main results from the focus on the younger cohort concern, firstly, the fact that clusters are mainly defined by the contractual arrangements, even though the internal variability and the variety in terms of states throughout the individual sequences confirm the complexity of the early career for a great number of young workers. Secondly, gender and the interaction between gender and education – net of other relevant variables – define a differentiated probability of accessing certain clusters (or better, certain models of labour market participation). Being women and being low-skilled are negatively related to the probability of being in more steady and secure (in terms of employment protection and stability and social security) clusters.