Cognitive Skills and Youth Labor Market Outcomes

This paper provides new cross-country evidence on the impact of cognitive skills, as measured by international achievement tests, on subsequent youth employment outcomes. In our initial analysis, we find that high average scores are strongly associated with increases in school enrollment and large r...

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Main Authors:	Lee, Jean N., Newhouse, David
Format:	Working Paper
Language:	en_US
Published:	World Bank, Washington, DC 2013
Subjects:	Labor Social Development Education
Online Access:	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/12131

id	okr-10986-12131
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	okr-10986-121312021-04-23T14:02:59Z Cognitive Skills and Youth Labor Market Outcomes Lee, Jean N. Newhouse, David Labor Social Development Education This paper provides new cross-country evidence on the impact of cognitive skills, as measured by international achievement tests, on subsequent youth employment outcomes. In our initial analysis, we find that high average scores are strongly associated with increases in school enrollment and large reductions in the incidence of unemployment, with slightly stronger effects for women. Higher scores also correlate with a larger share of youth employed in wage and salaried jobs, outside of agriculture, and to some extent in higher status occupations, but these findings are less robust. Conditional on average test scores, greater within-cohort dispersion lead to reduced school attendance and increased employment at young ages, perhaps reflecting the less precise signal value of further formal educational attainment in the presence of large quality differences. In specifications including both educational attainment and measured test scores, test scores have stronger effects on unemployment, but attainment is also strongly predictive of employment and some measures of job quality. We conclude that while increasing education quality can play a central role in improving youth employment outcomes, increasing attainment remains an important and complementary objective to foster the creation of better jobs for youth. However, preliminary extensions to the existing analysis using data from additional countries and years suggest much more important effects of test scores on measures of job quality, such as wage and non-agricultural employment, than on employment, enrollment, unemployment, or labor force participation. 2013-01-16T21:51:34Z 2013-01-16T21:51:34Z 2012-10 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/12131 en_US Background Paper for the World Development Report 2013; CC BY 3.0 IGO http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/igo/ World Bank World Bank, Washington, DC Publications & Research :: Working Paper Publications & Research
repository_type	Digital Repository
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	Digital Repositories
building	World Bank Open Knowledge Repository
collection	World Bank
language	en_US
topic	Labor Social Development Education
spellingShingle	Labor Social Development Education Lee, Jean N. Newhouse, David Cognitive Skills and Youth Labor Market Outcomes
relation	Background Paper for the World Development Report 2013;
description	This paper provides new cross-country evidence on the impact of cognitive skills, as measured by international achievement tests, on subsequent youth employment outcomes. In our initial analysis, we find that high average scores are strongly associated with increases in school enrollment and large reductions in the incidence of unemployment, with slightly stronger effects for women. Higher scores also correlate with a larger share of youth employed in wage and salaried jobs, outside of agriculture, and to some extent in higher status occupations, but these findings are less robust. Conditional on average test scores, greater within-cohort dispersion lead to reduced school attendance and increased employment at young ages, perhaps reflecting the less precise signal value of further formal educational attainment in the presence of large quality differences. In specifications including both educational attainment and measured test scores, test scores have stronger effects on unemployment, but attainment is also strongly predictive of employment and some measures of job quality. We conclude that while increasing education quality can play a central role in improving youth employment outcomes, increasing attainment remains an important and complementary objective to foster the creation of better jobs for youth. However, preliminary extensions to the existing analysis using data from additional countries and years suggest much more important effects of test scores on measures of job quality, such as wage and non-agricultural employment, than on employment, enrollment, unemployment, or labor force participation.
format	Publications & Research :: Working Paper
author	Lee, Jean N. Newhouse, David
author_facet	Lee, Jean N. Newhouse, David
author_sort	Lee, Jean N.
title	Cognitive Skills and Youth Labor Market Outcomes
title_short	Cognitive Skills and Youth Labor Market Outcomes
title_full	Cognitive Skills and Youth Labor Market Outcomes
title_fullStr	Cognitive Skills and Youth Labor Market Outcomes
title_full_unstemmed	Cognitive Skills and Youth Labor Market Outcomes
title_sort	cognitive skills and youth labor market outcomes
publisher	World Bank, Washington, DC
publishDate	2013
url	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/12131
_version_	1764419140670455808

Cognitive Skills and Youth Labor Market Outcomes

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