DIAL

Educational and labor market trajectories of youth in developing countries

Björn Nilsson

Juin 2017

Université Paris-Dauphine

Sous la direction de Philippe De Vreyer et Mohamed Ali Marouani

This thesis seeks to promote our understanding of the constraints and opportunities facing youth as they transit through schooling and to the labor market. The first chapter provides a literature review of the theoretical and empirical contributions to what we know about school-to-work transitions in developing countries and their specificities. The following chapter builds a computable general equilibrium model that is applied to the Malaysian labor market, in order to study the impact of skill-biased technological change and educational policy on labor market evolutions. Subsequent chapters examine household interactions arising from exogenous shocks, from the angle of children’s work and schooling. The findings from these chapters point to the presence of important spillover effects and heterogeneous absorption of shocks in the household. Impact evaluation of policy would therefore benefit from the systematic incorporation of such household-level externalities.

 

Keywords : School-to-work transitions, schooling, child labor, household risk sharing, idiosyncratic shocks.