The thesis focuses on the demand side of the labour market in conjecturing that 'the degree of attractiveness' of industry and firms to high-skilled workers could be an important determinant of regional labour market mismatch. Using data from the unexplored Employers Skills Survey, a dichotomous mismatch index based on skill-shortage vacancies is modelled as a function of firm and industry-level characteristics. Oacaxa-Blinder (OB) type decompositions are implemented to investigate the extent to which the predictors affect mismatch differently in England and Scotland. Two exploratory extensions are considered: (i) the inclusion of the Pareto shape parameter of an industry's firm size distribution, as an index of industry-level (average) productivity; (ii) a control for whether a firm is part of a multi-site organisation, believed as indicative of a firm export-status. UK level mismatch appears to be negatively correlated with both firm size and skill intensity. This is consistent with both a wide body of empirical evidence and an emerging two-sided heterogeneity theoretical literature showing that more productive firms are larger and tend to attract better workers. We also find a negative relationship between both the Pareto shape parameter and the multi-plant control, and firmlevel mismatch. At a regional level the key determinants seem to lose predictive power in Scotland where only the multi-site control retains statistical significance. To our knowledge, no study for the UK has to date ever: (i) used the same mismatch measure; (ii) adopted firm and industry-level characteristics as predictors of skill mismatch; (iii) decomposed skill mismatch using OB procedures. From a policy perspective, our findings suggest that addressing skill mismatch requires complementing policies targeting skill acquisition with interventions aimed at enhancing firms' and clusters' attractiveness to high skill workers. Migration, international trade openness and skill mismatch are in fact intrinsically intertwined and central to Scotland's post-Brexit future.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:759986 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Vanin, Pietropaolo |
| Contributors | Montagna, Catia ; Bender, Keith A. |
| Publisher | University of Aberdeen |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=238715 |
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