The impact of university openings on labor market outcomes Thema Working Paper
Abstract:
This paper provides evidence for the impact of university openings on labor market outcomes. I study the case of university openings that occurred in France in the 90’s, and exploit five waves from representative samples of young individuals who left the French education system, starting from wave 1992. I use difference-in-differences estimation technique, and find that the impact of university openings on labor market outcomes is heterogeneous according to the characteristics of the region where the opening occurs. I find that opening a new university increases the probability to be employed by about 8% points and increases wages by 5% in regions characterized by a lower level of education and a more disadvantaged socio-economical background. In contrast, no impact is found in regions where the unemployment rate is low and where the population is highly educated.
The Early Career Dynamics of Informality and Under-employment: Evidence from Egypt , joint with Clement Joubert
World Bank Policy Research Working Paper
Abstract:
This paper studies the early career dynamics of employment and formality using data from the Arab Republic of Egypt. With 14 rounds of Egypt’s labor force surveys several measures of informality and underemployment are constructed to examine how the labor market conditions faced by young men when they exit school shape their future employment trajectories. Employment outcomes at different levels of potential experience are linked to cross-cohort, cross-regional and cross-schooling level variation in labor market conditions at graduation to achieve identification. The results show that cohorts of Egyptian men who enter a labor market in which employment rates are high (low) are only better (worse) off for a few years. These fast mean reversals stand in contrast to the typical finding from rich countries that scarring effects persist through the first decade of a worker’s career.
Entry into Marriage, Motherhood and the Arab Spring: Evidence from Egypt, joint with Rozenn Hotte and Philip Verwimp,
Abstract:
The Egyptian Revolution has been shown to have triggered important economic and social changes, including the reduction of gender inequalities. However, few has been said on the impact of the Arab Spring on the age of entry into marriage and motherhood, which are key issues for women’s welfare. To shed light on this question, we combine an original dataset of the Egyptian Revolution, with the 2018 wave of the Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey. We rely on quasi-experimental geographical and historical variations in the level of violence, to build a difference-in-differences analysis. Our main findings are that women residing in rural areas who were aged between 16 and 20 at the time of the Egyptian Revolution, marry earlier than the previous cohorts, and have children earlier as well. These results tend to moderate previous evidence on the increase in women’s empowerment following the Arab Spring.
The impact of university openings on human capital formation, joint with Thomas Brodaty and Fabian Gouret (available upon request)
Abstract:
This paper, presents new evidence on the impact of university openings on the acquisition of human capital by the local youth in France. We exploit seven university openings between 1991-1993 in counties where no previous universities existed that we combine with five waves from representative samples of young individuals who left the French education system to compute differences-in-differences estimates. We find that opening a new university increases significantly the probability of attaining at least a two-year post-secondary degree by about 10 percentage points in counties that are initially undereducated compared to the rest of France. Conversely, university creations which occur in relatively educated counties does not have a significant impact on the acquisition of human capital.