While the effect of education and experience on labour market outcomes has been widely studied, the literature that analyses the influence of human capital competencies (talents, skills, and capabilities) is still relatively scarce. Using cross-sectional data from the REFLEX Project, we investigate the effect of personal competencies (both cognitive and non-cognitive) on two labour market outcomes among European university graduates: occupational status and earnings. Our estimates suggest that individuals endowed with a higher level of competencies are more likely to occupy managerial and professional positions and, to a lesser extent, technician jobs. Additionally, they also receive higher wages, but the relation is only significant for men. When we distinguish competencies according to their cognitive or non-cognitive nature, we find that only the latter are significant in explaining occupational status. In contrast, cognitive competencies are more related with wages. As regards the role of specific competencies, our findings suggest that leadership is the most relevant competence for the occupational status of males, especially in managerial positions. In contrast, initiative and enterprise abilities seem to be the most relevant skills for women in such positions. Intelligence produces the highest rewards in terms of earnings among the male subsample, while none of the competencies exerts a significant impact on females' wages.

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In this paper, we examine the ability of social benefits to soften the level of child deprivation.We construct a dedicated child deprivation indicator which allows us to better capture children's circumstances and examine the effect on it of contextual and sociodemographic factors jointly through multilevel models. We contribute to the scarce literature on the effects of social spending on child-specific deprivation from a cross-national perspective. We separately estimate the effect of each social benefit function on child deprivation to evaluate the impact of those benefit functions directly targeted at children and those benefit functions with no explicit intention of child deprivation protection. Our findings suggest that in order to explain differences across European countries in the level of child deprivation, country-level determinants are crucial. Moreover, social benefits play a key role that remains even when controlling for country-level determinants. An additional finding is that the most effective social benefit functions are not necessarily those targeted at children.

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In this paper, we use the 2000 -2008 waves of the German Socioeconomic Panel to examine overeducation transitions. The results are based on a first-order Markov model that allows us to account for both the initial conditions problem and potential endogeneity in attrition. We found that overeducation dynamics, especially the probability of entering overeducation, is significantly influenced by personality. Notwithstanding these differences associated with individual heterogeneity, there still appears to be considerable overeducation persistence. Almost 18% of the overeducation risk is due to individual state dependence, that is, the fact of having been overeducated in the previous year.

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As recession and financial crisis spread across Europe an increasing number of people are at risk of poverty and social exclusion. Children are more exposed to the risk of poverty and social exclusion than the overall population of the EU. The current climate of economic downturn calls out for an urgent need to break the vicious circle of intergenerational transmission of poverty and social exclusion in order to improve the well-being of children in a systematic and integrated way. Using the EU-SILC 2009 module on deprivation, this paper aims to contribute to the literature on poverty and social exclusion by analysing the determinants of material deprivation among children. Special attention is given to the type of household children belong to, a characteristic that is strongly determined by adults' behaviour. We find that the level of child deprivation varies among household types. Moreover, we confirm that even after controlling for the socio-economic characteristics of the household and parents, there still exist households with a lack of certain items that are strongly correlated to children with intense deprivation. Therefore, we can conclude that there exists an association between child deprivation and the household-deprivation profile that surpasses the socio-demographic characteristics of the household and parents.JEL CODES: I32, J13

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