My dissertation follows a coherent theme on three important and interesting issues for the Korean labor market as follows: Chapter 1 using data from the 2008 Panel Survey of Employment for the Disabled (PSED) investigates gender wage differentials among the disabled. The selectivity corrected decomposition framework is employed to examine what factors - endowments, discrimination, and selectivity - account for the wage gap. The main results are as follows: (1) the gender wage gap among the disabled is sizable: (2) the wage gap is significantly attributable to discrimination: (3) the endowments factor plays an important role in explaining gender wage differentials, as well: and (4) the presence of selection effects raises the observed wage gap. Such evidence suggests that Korean disabled female workers are more likely to be disadvantaged than their male counterparts in terms of wages.Chapter 2 using the 2007 Korea Labor and Income Panel Survey (KLIPS) examines the impact on wages of skills-job mismatch between acquired and required English language proficiency in Korean workplaces. The main findings of this study reveal (1) job mismatch in terms of English language skills has a strong statistically significant impact on wages: (2) the returns to over-skilling are negative (the wage penalty), while the returns to under-skilling are positive (the wage premium): and (3) the wage penalty associated with over-skilling is stronger than the wage premium associated with under-skilling.Chapter 3 using the KLIPS data from 1998 through 2008 investigates the causal relationship between veteran status and post-service labor market outcomes by examining the wage experience of veterans and nonveterans. The major empirical findings can be summarized as follows: (1) contrary to the general perception, veteran status has a significant positive impact on wages after completion of military service, inducing a veteran wage premium: and (2) in terms of the veteran wage premium in subgroups based on educational attainment at the time of entry into military service, less-educated veterans have a greater wage premium relative to their nonveteran counterparts of similar backgrounds than is the case for more-educated veterans. It suggests that military service could be particularly important for less-educated veterans.

Workers whose credentials and skills do not meet or exceed the required competencies for their jobs have been of interest to scholars investigating the transition from school to jobs. To understand how such mismatch arises in the transitional period, some scholars emphasize that the labor market cannot keep up with the pace of educational expansion. Thus, many highly educated workers do not find jobs that fit their schooling and skill level. Others locate the source of mismatch in the inability of education to produce enough workers with the desired skill levels in the labor market. By focusing on this mismatch, this dissertation aims to provide a better understanding of the relationship between education and work. In particular, this study examines data covering the past two decades to see how the number of workers with skill and educational mismatch has changed and how educational expansion and transformations in the labor market have contributed to the change. The results indicate that workers with such mismatch have generally increased over the past two decades, but educational expansion has minimally contributed to this change. Rather, it is more likely caused by business cycles or job characteristics. The study also explores how the practices applied to select suitable workers in the hiring process affects workers’ job matching. This study suggests that workers are classified into various types depending on strategies by which employers use to determine workers’ degree of fit. Subsequently, their earnings and job satisfaction vary according to workers’ membership in these types of groups.

Governments aim at reducing skill mismatch because of the adverse effects that it can trigger at the individual and firm level as well as at the country level. Skill mismatch has been defined as a persistent phenomenon with long lasting cross-country differences (Mavromaras et al., 2013). This phenomenon could thus be explained by equivalent cross-country differences in national public policies. The purpose of this thesis is to test the impact of public policies on the probability of being skill mismatched across OECD countries. This thesis explores the recent OECD Survey of Adult Skills from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies using an alternative measure of skill mismatch. Data for public policies come from a wide variety of sources. The results show that both policies targeted on firms (‘demand side of skills’) and policies dealing with the available workforce (‘supply side of skills’) can result in a reduction of skill mismatch levels. Regarding the demand side of skills, countries with smooth regulations on the firing of permanent employees, with efficient policies increasing the allocative efficiency and with a strong focus on entrepreneurship seem to experience lower levels of skill mismatch. For the case of the supply side of skills, housing policies efficient at increasing labour mobility together with a higher participation in lifelong learning and higher investments in active labour market programmes and education are expected to be associated with a reduction of skill mismatch.

Cette thèse vise à contribuer à une meilleure compréhension des facteurs qui agissent sur la décision de migrer des individus. Dans le chapitre 1, nous montrons qu’au Portugal, les immigrés occupent souvent des postes pour lesquels ils sont surqualifiés, et que cette non-adéquation entre profils et emplois occupés influence la sélection dans la migration. Les phénomènes de surqualification, plus marqués chez les individus les plus qualifiés, entrainent une sélection négative des migrants, tandis qu’une bonne adéquation entre profils et emplois conduit à une sélection positive.Dans le chapitre 2, nous tirons profit d’une expérimentation sur le terrain pour comprendre comment les décisions de migrer illégalement vers l’Europe des jeunes gambiens sont influencées par l’information qu’ils ont sur les risques associés à cette mobilité. Nous montrons d’abord que les participants au jeu surestiment à la fois le risque de périr en route et la probabilité d’obtenir un statut légal en Europe. Nos résultats suggèrent par ailleurs que la décision de migrer illégalement est influencée par l’une et l’autre probabilité. Informer les candidats au départ sur les risques réels encourus pourrait ainsi les aider à prendre des décisions en connaissance de cause et contribuerait peut-être à sauver des vies. Dans le chapitre 3, nous examinons les liens entre structure familiale et migration, en étudiant l’influence du type d’union des mères sur le comportement migratoire de leurs enfants. Nous trouvons que les enfants nés de mères en union polygame sont plus enclins à migrer vers l’étranger. Nous expliquons ce résultat par la rivalité fraternelle qui en découle. / The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to a better understanding of the drivers of international migration. In Chapter 1, we document that immigrants in Portugal face a high incidence of occupational-skill mismatch, and show how it affects the selection into migration. We find that the incidence of over-education leads to negative selection while correct occupational-skill matches lead to positive selection. In Chapter 2, we rely on a lab-in-the-field experiment to understand the willingness to migrate illegally of young males aged 15 to 25 in The Gambia. We first show that potential migrants overestimate both the risk of dying en route to Europe, and the probability of obtaining legal residency status. The experimental results suggestthat the willingness to migrate illegally is affected by information on the chances of dying en route and of obtaining a legal residence permit. Providing providing potential migrants with official numbers on both probabilities thus affect their likelihood of migrating. This has the potential to help migrants make informed decisions and perhaps save lives. In Chapter 3, we investigate the impact of family structure on international migration decisions. We find that children of mothers in polygynous unions are more likely to migrate internationally. We provide further evidence suggesting that this result is due to sibling rivalry: having full- or half-siblings in migration increases the likelihood of migrating. Our evidence suggests that co-wives’ rivalry as documented elsewhere trickles down to children’s rivalry in migration, suggesting that while neglected in the literature, family structure is crucial to understanding migration.

The imbalance in the labor market between the supply of and demand for skills is a widespread phenomenon that may contribute to unemployment and lower productivity and competitiveness. This diploma thesis aims to explore and understand the complex phenomena of skill mismatches on the labor market. As skill mismatch manifests itself in various forms, there exist different but also related concepts of educational or qualification and skill mismatches. In the first part a clear distinction between skill and qualification mismatch is made, the links between different types of mismatches are described and the debate of using each of the concepts is situated as well as the comparison of advantages and disadvantages of different concepts. Next part of this thesis concerns also with potential causes of mismatches in the labor market as well as its consequences and implications for individuals, businesses and society as a whole. In the next section, the information on possible measures of educational or qualification and skill mismatches is offered and the comparison of these measures is made. A new approach for measuring skill mismatch is introduced. Due to published results from PIAAC survey, which contains measures of skill proficiency and also information about qualifications, educational as well as...