This is another interesting article: "The Wage Effects of Graduate Competition" (Brynin and Longhi, 2006). It gets at the importance for returns to education, of graduate supply within particular occupations. This is referred to as "graduate density" and is estimated using the British Labour Force Survey. We'll be able to get a nicer measure of graduate density in Ireland using that data I sent round earlier in the week which shows how many graduates emerege from each discipline at each level in each HEA institution.
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But won't graduate density be affected by migration in and out of the country.To take an extreme example our institutions probably "graduate" very few cleaners because they are mostly from China and to some extent cleaners' wages are set in Beijing.Medicine is an interesting example with lots of cross-hauling: we import and export them.
Fair point Kevin. The HEA data on the number of graduates produced in each discipline does not take any account of graduate migration. This means that using something like a Labour Force Survey has a clear advantage, never mind that a Labour Force Survey also provides a comparison group of non-graduates!
Yes but no but. The LFS still won't have all the potential medics, cleaners etc in China. There is some work on cohort size and wages, I think Steve Nickell worked on this some years ago and there is Freeman's paper "Are workers' wages set in Beijing?". In some markets where wages are rigid then the adjustment due to immigration may be in quantity : i.e. Irish workers may be unemployed or shift to other occupations in the long run.
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