Vertical and Horizontal Education Responses to Macroeconomic Conditions

This project studies how young people adjust their education decisions in response to economic conditions, such as recessions or periods of high unemployment. When job prospects worsen, do students stay in school longer? Do they change what they study? And how do these decisions depend on how education systems are structured across countries? Most prior research examines education choices along a single dimension—either the level of education (how long students stay in school) or the field of study (what they specialize in). This project brings these two dimensions together, studying them jointly in a cross-country context. The goal is to better understand how economic incentives and institutional features of education systems interact to shape young people’s choices. The project uses international microdata and institutional information from sources such as Eurostat and the OECD, covering a large number of European countries. A central component of the research involves carefully documenting and comparing education systems across countries—for example, identifying at what ages students typically make key education decisions and how flexible or irreversible those decisions are. RAs will contribute to building and validating novel datasets, organizing and coding institutional information, and supporting empirical analysis.