Comparative Analysis of Transitions from Education to Work in Europe Education and Unemployment: Patterns of Labour Market Entry in France, the United Kingdom and West Germany

Over the last two decades, youth unemployment emerged as one of the major problems of many contemporary European societies. As educational achievement is regularly argued to prevent labour market exclusion, this paper explores the educational stratification of unemployment in the early labour market career and its institutional embeddedness in specific education and employment systems. For the sake of comparative analysis, the paper investigates youth unemployment in France, the United Kingdom and West Germany as these three countries differ greatly in terms of major institutional characteristics of their educational systems and labour markets. The analyses use microdata from national Labour Force Surveys of the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s allowing an assessment of recent trends as well as comparative analysis. Methodologically, we rely on single-stage and sequential logit models to estimate the effects of individual educational achievement on unemployment risks. As a result, we are able to present evidence of a sharp distinction between the educational stratification observed in Germany on the one hand and France and the United Kingdom on the other. In Germany, labour market entry is found to be quite smooth and immediate for vocationally qualified leavers, while extensive periods of searching for a first job is confined almost exclusively to the least qualified. After initial employment has been found, education plays a negligible role in the risk of unemployment which is tied more to aspects of employment positions. In France and Britain, in contrast, the match between qualifications and jobs is less clear-cut. Rather, the level of education provides advantages in terms of reduced time searching for employment and lower job instability, although differentiation is much less pronounced. In addition, education effects maintain a positive impact on job stability even controlling for positional characteristics, suggesting a more gradual match between qualifications and attainment. Results are found to be stable for both time periods, indicating idiosyncratic rather than secular changes in the educational stratification of youth unemployment over the last decade.