The Effects Of Education On Three Job-Related Issues

THE EFFECTS OF EDUCATION

ON

THREE JOB-RELATED ISSUES





Miguel de Santos García








M. Sc. Economics

Department of Economics

University College London



September 1996






* I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Donald Verry, who supervised this dissertation, to Francisco Javier de Santos for providing documentation from Spain and to JavierFerri and Pilar Beneito for providing the data set and helpful comments. Any mistakes are, however, my own responsibility.

** This research was financed by Fundación Ramón Areces and one of their grants within their "IX Convocatoria de Becas para la ampliación de estudios en el extranjero en Economía".


TABLE OF CONTENTS.



1. INTRODUCTION. 3


2. REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE. 42.1. THE EFFECTS OF EDUCATION ON DURATION TO FIRST JOB. 4
2.2. THE EFFECTS OF EDUCATION ON UNIONISATION. 8
2.3. THE EFFECTS OF EDUCATION ON PROMOTION WITHIN-THE-JOB. 10

3. DATA AND SOME DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS. 13

3.1. THE DATA SOURCE. 13
3.2. SOME DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS. 13

4. METHODS OF ESTIMATION. 19

4.1. THE EFFECTS OF EDUCATION ON DURATION TO FIRST JOB. 19
4.2. THEEFFECTS OF EDUCATION ON UNIONISATION. 22
4.3. THE EFFECTS OF EDUCATION ON PROMOTION WITHIN-THE-JOB. 26

5. RESULTS. 27

5.1. THE EFFECTS OF EDUCATION ON DURATION TO FIRST JOB. 27
5.2. THE EFFECTS OF EDUCATION ON UNIONISATION. 33
5.3. THE EFFECTS OF EDUCATION ON PROMOTION WITHIN-THE-JOB. 36

6. CONCLUSIONS. 39


APPENDIX A. List of variables used and definitions. 41


APPENDIXB. Description of variables. 45


BIBLIOGRAPHY 47




1. INTRODUCTION.


The educational level of Spanish people has undergone a radical change during the last decades. During the first decades of the century very few people could achieve a university degree, and only those living in large cities and from well off families could even think of attending university. However, thatsituation has changed during the last few years, mainly due to an improvement of the quality of life in the Spanish society in general and the larger and cheaper supply of public education resulting from a greater share of the Public Budget going to it. This change has had important consequences in the Spanish labour market, such as improved chances of securing better jobs and the improvedquality of the Spanish labour force. Hence, my aim with the present dissertation is to see the effect of educational attainment on three job- related characteristics namely, duration to first job, unionisation and promotion within-the job, for a sample of the Spanish labour market in 1991.

The dissertation is structured as follows: the second section contains a review of the relevantliterature for each of the topics; the third section contains a description of the data source and some descriptive statistics; the fourth section contains the description of the method of estimation for each of the topics; the fifth section presents the empirical results and discusses their significance.

2. REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE.



2.1. THE EFFECTS OF EDUCATION ON DURATION TO FIRST JOB.During the last two decades, the unemployment rate in Spain has been increasing in time. In 1985 it reached 21%, falling to 16.6% in 1990 and growing ever since, reaching an almost steady, and exceptionally high, 23% for the last few months in 1996. However, in the late sixties and early seventies the situation was quite different, the unemployment rate averaging about 1.5%.
Asreported in Fina (1987), this deterioration is due mainly to a loss of jobs rather than to an insufficient growth in the number of new jobs needed to absorb the increase in the active population, above all because the Spanish labour force has registered a relatively modest growth even though the Spanish population has been among the fastest growing in Europe. For instance, between 1975-1985...