Assist. Prof. Dita Eckardt

Labor Market Entry Conditions and Occupational Mismatch

In a recent study, Dita Eckardt demonstrates that workers who hold apprenticeships in Germany experience sizable wage penalties when working in occupations different from their training. In this project, she considers the causes of occupational mismatch for this group of workers, focusing on the effects of labor market entry conditions for apprenticeship graduates. She finds that higher entry unemployment leads to persistent earnings losses that are driven by full-time wage effects. At the same time, occupational matching, as measured by work in the training occupation or the task similarity between training and occupation, persistently falls. A conceptual framework sheds light on underlying mechanisms and shows that lower levels of matching can arise from adverse general or occupation-specific shocks. The findings highlight that the high-quality provision of specific skills can protect apprenticeship graduates from unemployment due to adverse entry conditions but may expose them to occupational mismatch that can entail long-term productivity effects. During her visit to CES, she is planning to work on this project and explore new research questions within the same agenda.

Ms. Eckardt is an economist with research interests in labor economics and applied econometrics. One strand of her work focuses on studying the specificity of human capital with the goal of providing insights into the skills that workers require to carry out the tasks demanded across different occupations.

Dita Eckardt is an Assistant Professor in Economics at the University of Warwick. She holds a PhD and an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics as well as a BA in Economics from the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining Warwick, she spent a year as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.