
Rolf van der VeldenMaastricht University | UM · Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market
Rolf van der Velden
PhD
About
318
Publications
119,030
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Introduction
Rolf van der Velden (1955) is professor emeritus at the Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA) of Maastricht University. Current research focuses on the intergenerational transmission of skills, skills development in education, transition from school to work, knowledge economy and the demand for 21st century skills, skills mismatches and the acquisition and decline of skills over the life course. He was coordinator in REFLEX, PIAAC, and Nationaal Cohortonderzoek Onderwijs.
Additional affiliations
July 1990 - May 2022
Position
- Director of ROA and Program director of Education and Occupational Career
Description
- Rolf van der Velden (1955) is professor emeritus at Maastricht University, and former director of the Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA) and program director Education and Occupational Career at the same institute.
Publications
Publications (318)
This article explores the total (measured and unmeasured) effect of education on different socio-economic outcomes. The analysis shows that the usual regression models typically underestimate the effects of education. The effects of education are decomposed into three
sources of variation: courses of study, schools and student composition. Schools...
This publication (http://www.roa.nl/projects/reflex/reflex.htm#publications) is about higher eduction and the labour market. Higher education policy has increasingly gained a European dimension, with its own distinct influence over national education policies. Against this background, a major project was launched, the REFLEX project (www.reflexproj...
Education-job mismatches are reported to have serious effects on wages and other labour market outcomes. Such results are often cited in support of assignment theory, but can also be explained by institutional and human capital models. To test the assignment explanation, we examine the relation between educational mismatches and skill mismatches. I...
This paper compares the employment outcomes of liberal arts graduates from Dutch university colleges with those of their peers who pursued conventional, subject-specific bachelor’s degrees. Using data from the Dutch National Alumni Survey, the analysis includes 14,933 respondents who completed a master’s programme at a research university, with 210...
In this paper, we examine the effect of general skills on wages for vocationally educated workers with a qualification at upper secondary level. While general skills are considered crucial for labour market success of workers in general, it is not clear whether this also holds for the vocationally educated workers. We use the recently developed con...
The Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is currently the most important data source that provides information on the key skills possessed by workers, including literacy and numeracy. However, to assess skill mismatch, we also need information on the required skills in those domains, measured in the same metric a...
This study investigates the role of family composition on children's development during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic, net of family socioeconomic status (SES). At the start of the COVID‐19 pandemic in the first half of 2020, schools closed and children all around the world were sent home, providing a rare opportunity to study th...
This paper investigates to what extent the likelihood of young people being long-term NEET can be explained by low literacy skills, how this varies across advanced countries, and how this cross-national variation can be explained by education and social policies. We use PIAAC data and include macro-level indicators on education and social policies....
Using a large dataset of around 500,000 students from about 1,900 schools, this paper shows the effect of two school closures and 1.5 years of the COVID-19 pandemic on standardized learning growth for mathematics, reading, and spelling in Dutch primary education. We find that the school closures have a negative effect on standardized learning growt...
The COVID-19-pandemic forced many countries to close schools abruptly in the spring of 2020. These school closures and the subsequent period of distance learning has led to concerns about increasing inequality in education, as children from lower-educated and poorer families have less access to (additional) resources at home. This study analyzes di...
Motherhood is often cited as one of the main reasons for young women to become NEET (not in employment, education, or training). Given the potential long-term negative implications of NEET status, it is important to understand which types of resources can help young mothers to avoid becoming NEET around childbirth. In this paper we investigate how...
After more than a year of COVID-19 crisis and the school closures that followed all around the world, the concerns about lower learning growth and exacerbated inequalities are larger than ever. In this paper, we use unique data to analyse how one full year of COVID-19 crisis in Dutch primary education has affected learning growth and pre-existing i...
Most existing studies on excellence programmes focus primarily on the characteristics of students and/or programmes. However, little is known about the effects of participation in excellence programmes on cognitive and non-cognitive outcome measures. This study uses longitudinal data on over 1,000 students from five higher education institutions in...
This paper examines the effectiveness of a 10-hour cognitive-based creativity training
on idea generation and idea evaluation among 51 undergraduate students (mean age
22) from a large university in the Netherlands. A pre-post-test within-subject design
was conducted. All 51 students received the training as part of their bachelor program,
and were...
In many countries, the quality of (large-scale quantitative) educational research is threatened by data challenges. In this article, we present an innovative data research project from the Netherlands in which many of the challenges that come forward in previous literature are addressed. The Netherlands Cohort Study on Education [in Dutch abbreviat...
Policy measures to combat low literacy are often targeted at municipalities or regions with low levels of literacy. However, current surveys on literacy do not contain enough observations at this level to allow for reliable estimates when using only direct estimation techniques. To provide more reliable results at a detailed regional level, alterna...
This article provides empirical evidence on the relation between institutional characteristics of labour markets that frame allocation processes, and optimal skill matching at the individual level. We investigate the extent to which skill-based job-worker matches are associated with employment protection legislation (EPL), unemployment benefits, an...
Academic dismissal policies are increasingly implemented to promote academic success, with existing empirical evidence mostly restricted to short-run outcomes. This study examines long-term academic outcomes of academic dismissal for two cohorts (N=1707) of first-year bachelor students in Economics and Business at a Dutch university. Using administ...
https://didactiefonline.nl/artikel/zo-match-je-kansen-met-opbrengsten
Grootschalig cohortonderzoek in het vwo toont aan: kansen hoeven het niet af te leggen tegen rendement. Vooral heterogene brugklassen kunnen beide bereiken.
Kansen en rendement gaan niet vanzelfsprekend samen. Althans, zo lijkt het vaak: een leerling die een kans krijgt op een h...
Skills and skill mismatches affect workers' productivity. However, current approaches to measuring this problem fail to specify the underlying mechanism. In this paper, we develop a new perspective by integrating skill proficiency and skill use into a new concept called 'effective skill'. Effective skill is defined as a multiplicative function of s...
Free access until Oct 9, 2018: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927537118300903
This paper analyses the relationship between temporary employment and the intensity of on-the-job informal learning across 20 developed countries. Using microdata from the OECD's PIAAC survey, we estimate an instrumented endogenous switching regressi...
De transitie van school-naar-werk is een van de belangrijke fases in de levensloop. Tijdens deze periode wordt een aantal belangrijke beslissingen genomen. Om te begrijpen waarom bij sommige jongeren deze transitie niet goed verloopt, gebruiken we in dit artikel sequentieanalyse en logistische regressiemodellen om problematische trajecten na het ve...
The explicit assumption in most literature on educational and skill mismatches is that these mismatches are inherently costly for workers. However, the results in the literature on the effects of underqualification or underskilling on wages and job satisfaction only partly support this hypothesis. Rather than assuming that both skill surpluses and...
Résumé
Les auteurs s'intéressent aux situations de surqualification et de chômage chez les jeunes diplômés du supérieur dans dix‐sept pays européens en analysant le rôle à cet égard des compétences ≪spécialisées≫ et des compétences ≪universitaires de base≫. Conformément à la thèse de l'éviction, les compétences spécialisées protègent davantage de l...
Resumen
Se explora la relación entre competencias y riesgo de sobrecalificación y desempleo en titulados universitarios de 17 países europeos. Distinguiendo entre competencias especializadas y académicas, se observa que, como predice la hipótesis de exclusión, las primeras ofrecen mayor protección frente al riesgo de sobrecalificación cuando aument...
Résumé
Les auteurs analysent les écarts dans les taux d'inadéquation entre compétences et emploi selon le pays et la discipline à partir de données sur l'insertion des jeunes diplômés en Europe et au Japon. S'agissant des pays, l'inadéquation ≪horizontale≫ (mauvaise spécialisation) diminue en cas de forte protection de l'emploi, d'assurance chômage...
Resumen
Con datos de los inicios profesionales de titulados universitarios europeos y japoneses, se investiga el papel de las instituciones y los desequilibrios del mercado laboral en el desajuste vertical, horizontal y total de las calificaciones. El horizontal resulta menor en países con mucha protección del empleo, mejores subsidios de desempleo...
Op 30 maart overleed Jaap Dronkers aan de gevolgen van een ernstig herseninfarct. Met het overlijden van Jaap is de Nederlandse sociologie een van haar meest veelzijdige beoefenaren en een van haar meest invloedrijke publieke pleitbezorgers verloren. Jaap was een uiterst productieve geleerde: hij schreef over van alles, en over alles veel: onderwij...
Workers with a college degree earn substantially more than workers with no such degree. Using recent data from 22 OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries, we estimate this college wage premium at 28 per cent for male full-time working employees, on average, ranging from 18 per cent in Sweden to 50 per cent in the Slov...
The European Union, governments and universities, stimulate international mobility of students. But do internationally mobile students benefit of their study abroad after graduation?
This article reports a study comparing the labour market situation of graduates from universities in Poland, Hungary, Latvia and France who studied for one year at a D...
The European Union, governments and universities, stimulate international mobility of students. But what do internationally mobile students learn while being abroad? This article compares the competence development of internationally mobile students while being abroad with the competence development of their peers who stay at the home university. T...
If we need to compare competence levels of large groups of students, e.g. to evaluate teaching innovations or to compare the effect of teaching methods between countries, we need a reliable instrument that is sensitive enough to measure a change in competence levels as a result of these innovations or methods, and is not cross-culturally biased. A...
In this paper (http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/JVWDcvp6YCnnTn999UVu/full) an analysis is carried out whether objective tests and subjective self-assessments in international large-scale studies yield similar results when looking at cross-national differences in the effects of skills on earnings, and skills patterns across countries, fields of stu...
We investigate to what extent differences in educational mismatches across countries and fields of study are explained by differences in labour institutions, educational institutions, and labour market imbalances. We rely on early career data for graduates in Europe and Japan and distinguish between full mismatch (FMM: field-of-study mismatch and o...
Although optimal labour market allocation of school leavers benefits individuals, employers
and societies, a substantial part of European school leavers do not find a job that matches
their field or level of education. This paper explores the extent to which horizontal and
vertical education-to-job matches of European school leavers from secondary...
This article empirically explores how the often reported relationship between educational mismatches and wages can best be
understood. Exploiting the newly published Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) data, we are
able to achieve a better estimation of the classical Duncan and Hoffman ORU model than previous papers...
The main research question of this paper is the combined estimation of the effects of educational systems, school composition, track level, and country of origin on the educational achievement of 15-year-old migrant students. We focus specifically on the effects of socioeconomic and ethnic background on achievement scores and the extent to which th...
In this study we elicit employers’ preferences for a variety of CV attributes and types of skills when recruiting university graduates. Using two discrete choice experiments, we simulate the two common steps of the graduate recruitment process: (1) the selection of suitable candidates for job interviews based on CVs, and (2) the hiring of graduates...
In this chapter, we will estimate the effects on language skills of two characteristics of school populations: average/share and diversity, on both the ethnic and the sociocultural dimensions. We will use the cross-national Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2006 data for native students and students with an immigrant background, i...
This paper (http://www.roa.unimaas.nl/pdf_publications/2010/ROA_RM_2010_7.pdf) investigates the factors that contribute to the cross-country variation in graduateovereducation and its persistence by means of multi-level analysis. Our analysis is basedon data from representative surveys among graduates in thirteen European countries andJapan and foc...
This chapter assesses IEO in relation to parental education in the Netherlands. It shows the contribution of primary and secondary effects to IEO in the transitions to upper secondary and tertiary education for cohorts of students born in the 1970s and later. The chapter provides an overview of the Dutch educational system and the distribution of s...
The world is changing rapidly in a lot of ways, but the dominant change is in ICT. Changing technology has far-reaching implications for how we act and interact at work, in education, in civic life and at home. Furthermore, this change is in large part the driving force behind many of the other major changes, such as globalization, flexibilization...
The theme of this conference, “Modeling and Measurement of Competences in Higher Education”, indicates that there is a growing awareness that the measurement of competences should not be restricted to primary and secondary education, but should also enter into the domain of higher education.
The point of departure of this study was a lack of information on the employers’ perspective on what makes graduates employable. The study uses an innovative approach to look at employers’ preferences for graduates, namely by simulating the selection process with hypothetical candidates. This so-called conjoint study with responses from more than 9...
The world is changing rapidly in a lot of ways, but the dominant change is in ICT.Changing technology has far-reaching implications for how we act and interact at work,in education, in civic life and at home. Furthermore, this change is in large part the drivingforce behind many of the other major changes, such as globalization and flexibilizationT...
The main research question of this article is concerned with the combined estimation of the effects of educational systems, school composition, track level, and country of origin on the educational achievement of 15-year-old migrant students. The authors focus specifically on the effects of socioeconomic and ethnic background on achievement scores...
In this paper (http://www.roa.unimaas.nl/pdf_publications/2012/ROA_RM_2012_5.pdf) we investigate how non-cognitive skills can explain individual differences in earlyschool-leaving controlling for cognitive skills. We use a large Dutch representative longitudinalcohort study “Secondary Education Pupil Cohort 1999.” In the first year of this study, p...
This study (http://www.roa.unimaas.nl/pdf_publications/2012/ROA_RM_2012_7.pdf) analyzes four different transmission mechanisms, through which father’searnings affect son’s earnings: the educational attainment, cognitive skills, the culturalcapital of the family and the social capital in the neighborhood. Using a unique dataset that combines panel d...
This paper (http://www.roa.unimaas.nl/pdf_publications/2012/ROA_RM_2012_2.pdf) analyzes the relationship between cognitive skills, measured at age 12, andearnings of males and females at the age of 35, conditional on their attained educationallevel. Employing a large data set that combines a longitudinal school cohort survey withincome data from Du...
In this paper (http://www.roa.unimaas.nl/pdf_publications/2012/ROA_RM_2012_6.pdf) we investigate if peer relations affect a student’s risk of early school-leaving. We use the sociometric data collection from the Dutch “Secondary Education Pupil Cohort 1999” to identify peer relations in a sample of almost 20,000 students in the first grade of secon...
This paper (http://www.roa.unimaas.nl/pdf_publications/2012/ROA_RM_2012_1.pdf) explores the relationship between graduates’ skill levels and the risk of overeducation and unemployment in 17 European countries. We distinguish between field-specific and general skills and between two labour market segments, the occupational domain of a particular fie...
The main research question of this article is concerned with the combined estimation of the effects of educational systems, school composition, track level, and country of origin on the educational achievement of 15-year-old migrant students. The authors focus specifically on the effects of socioeconomic and ethnic background on achievement scores...