The relationship between education and income inequality is of fundamental importance. In this book, an international group of renowned contributors focus on patterns of inequality and their relationship to education using recent data from European countries. The fresh and unique research deals with important topics such as: wage and education inequality, differences in earnings related to gender, the role of labour market institutions, demographic and cohort effects on inequality, intergenerational education and income mobility, the extent of 'overeducation' and job and life satisfaction inequality. The wealth of new empirical evidence presented will make this book an invaluable resource for labour and education economists, educationalists, policy-makers and academics interested in the distribution of income, inequality and education within the fields of sociology and public policy.

Is it possible for low-paid workers to obtain higher-paid jobs through upward mobility over time within the earnings distribution? Based on new empirical evidence from a number of European countries, the book focuses on earnings mobility, an issue that is of increasing concern to policymakers and governments throughout the world. The widening earnings dispersion which is developing in European labour markets has had the inevitable consequence of worsening the position of the poorer members of society. This book identifies those individual characteristics which affect upward mobility either by increasing or decreasing the probability of individual workers improving their chances of earning higher wages. The authors, including some of the leading labour economists in Europe, offer a comprehensive European perspective covering a total of thirteen countries. They shed new light on the way in which labour market incentives and institutions affect both the incidence and duration of low-paid employment. This book will be of interest to both academics with an interest in labour economics and policy makers throughout Europe.

The past few decades have seen a revolutionary increase in interest in the economic role of education and training at the societal, business, and individual levels. This is mainly due to the strong post-war growth in industrialized economies, which has been driven by rapid technological progress and far-reaching structural change and, in the end, has resulted in increasingly skill-intensive production and growing demandfor more educated labour. Today it is frequently argued that with the increasing importance of the role of know-how, the workforce has become the most important single input in the production process. Simultaneously the dramatic increase in the availability of large micro-Ievel databases has opened enormous possibilities to study the economic role of human capital creation also empirically. The economic perspective of human capital accumulation is, however, of utmost importance also in times of deep economic recession. Periods of economic slowdown and rapidly increasing unemployment tend to in crease the demandfor advanced education and training in particular. This brings up, in turn, questions regarding overeducation and satisfying both private and social retums on investments in human capital.