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In most advanced countries, young people are now expected to remain in education until the age of 18 and, in a context of poor opportunities for those who leave at an early stage, there are concerns about those who are being left behind. In this paper we use comparable survey data to focus on the destinations of young people in two contrasting societies, England and Wales and Japan. We compare the destinations of 19/20-year-olds in the two countries, with a strong focus on those who leave education at an early stage, and go on to explore the extent to which young people's socio-economic backgrounds and their orientations to education explain their post-school experiences. We argue that, in both societies, those who enter the labour market before the age of 20 face severe difficulties irrespective of their social background. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study investigates the recent process of job polarization in Japan. We focus on three particular aspects: the relationship with business cycles, total hours rather than employment and age cohorts. We find that, regardless of whether the focus is employment or total hours, job polarization is concentrated in recessions and that job polarization has occurred mainly in younger-age cohorts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The cohort effect in the labor market refers to the lasting impact on employment conditions, such as wages and job separation, of a group of people of the same age, gender, and educational background that is created by supply and demand in the labor market at the time of graduation and that group's population size. This article outlines conventional research findings on the The cohort effect in the labor market refers to the lasting impact on employment conditions, such as wages and job separation, of a group of people of the same age, gender, and educational background that is created by supply and demand in the labor market at the time of graduation and that group's population size. This article outlines conventional research findings on the cohort effect, and presents the results of research conducted using long-term data, including data from the prolonged hiring slump known in Japan as the "employment ice age." During this time, rising unemployment rates at the time of graduation left graduates unable to find employment immediately after graduation or thereafter, increasing the likelihood that they would obtain provisional employment or remain unemployed altogether. A trend toward declining annual incomes was especially noticeable among high school graduates. This is attributable to the limited employment opportunities available to the less educated during a recession as well as to the effects of a structural pitfall of the Japanese labor market. That is, because of the weakness of the market's evaluation functions and the high level of mobility costs, the inability to find employment immediately after graduation makes it tremendously difficult to improve one's situation later. Helping the employment ice-age generation will require intensive skill development efforts and also efforts by the government and corporate sector aimed at improving the evaluation functions of the labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is recognized, mainly from Japanese aggregate data, that the wage-tenure profile is affected by conditions in external labor markets, by productivity, and by population aging. We estimate the effects of these factors on the wage-tenure profile using matched employer-employee panel data at the firm level for the period since the bursting of the bubble economy in Japan. The results show that ceteris paribus, the steepness of the wage-tenure profile is positively related to labor productivity, but negatively related to tightness of external labor markets and aging of employees. We also find that the wagetenure profile tended to flatten in firms that reduced employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]