Student Employment in Europe and Subsequent Labour Market Outcomes

Talk by Victor Rudakov (Freie Universität Berlin) as part of the Research Seminar Series of the IOS Economics Department.

The study investigates the impact of student employment on the future labour market outcomes of university graduates in 13 European countries. We employ a dataset of the EUROGRADUATE survey, which includes rich information on the educational and socio-demographic characteristics of the graduates of European universities from the 2016 and 2021 cohorts, as well as data on their current labour market situation. Using different methods of regression analysis (OLS, Logistic Regression, Entropy Balancing and Oster Test), we estimate the impact of employment during studies on salaries and employment after graduation. We found a positive impact of student employment on employment and salaries after graduation for the entire EG dataset. The magnitude of the effect increases if the work was related to the field of study and decreases for work unrelated to the study field. Our study shows considerable heterogeneity in the effect of student employment on salaries between countries of Europe. The effect of student employment on salaries is more likely to be low or insignificant in countries of Western Europe, while in countries of Eastern and Southern Europe with higher youth unemployment rates, student employment more positively affects labour market success of graduates. We found no evidence that in the long-run returns to student employment diminish.