Youth labor market expectations and job matching in sub-Saharan Africa: evidence from school-to-work transition surveys

In this paper, we investigate the factors that influence youth labour market expectations and outcomes. We also perform a job matching exercise to understand youth labour market dynamics in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our results show that youth education is an influential factor of youth employment expectations and employment, ceteris paribus. Higher educational attainments have a great impact on expecting and securing better jobs, particularly in the technical and professional fields. Youth with low educational attainments, particularly primary education and lower, have a higher tendency to expect to be employed in occupations with low job complexity. Our results indicate a severe job-skill mismatch in all occupational categories, both before and after the youth’s transition into the labour market. Using education as the only selection criterion, we found that less than 10 per cent of employment expectations match with skills required while 55 per cent and 34 per cent are under or over-educated for the jobs expected, respectively. Over and under education is a notable feature in youth labour markets in Sub-Saharan Africa. About 47 per cent of employed youth in the sample are overqualified for their respective jobs while 28 per cent are under qualified.     

Overeducation, regional labor markets, and spatial flexibility

For most workers, access to suitable employment is severely restricted by the fact that they look for jobs in the regional labor market rather than the global one. In this paper we analyze how macrolevel opportunities (regional market characteristics) and microlevel restrictions (the extent to which job searchers are restricted to the regional market) can help to explain the phenomenon of overeducation. We use a two-step procedure to control selective access to employment. The results show that the size of the labor market is an important factor in avoiding overeducation.     

Good News and Bad News: Search from Unknown Wage Offer Distributions

The largest market in national economies is the labor market. Labor market contracting is characterized by job search, often from unknown wage offer distributions. This paper reports experimental tests of finite horizon models of job search in which the wage offer distribution is unknown. Theoretically-optimal search from an unknown wage offer distribution can have the seemingly paradoxical property that some offers will be accepted that are lower than other offers that will be rejected in the same period of the search horizon. Thus the reservation wage property (or lowest acceptable wage path) may not exist. This can occur because an offer that is a priori relatively high (good news) can imply that it is highly probable that search is from a favorable distribution, and such an offer can look unattractive when it is an a posteriori relatively low offer from a favorable distribution (bad news). This paper reports results from experimental treatments for search from unknown distributions in which the reservation wage property does exist and treatments in which it does not exist. We find that the consistency of search behavior with search theory reported in earlier papers is robust to the presence or absence of the reservation wage property and to whether the draws come from known or unknown distributions.     

网络搜索引擎——功能、使用技巧与检索策略

伴随Internet爆炸性的发展,以及网上信息资源的快速增长,网络搜索引擎便应运而生了。而如今越来越多的研究者依赖于搜索引擎获得信息,人们的工作、学习、生活与网络搜索引擎已密不可分,把搜索比喻成是一种生活方式已毫不为过。所以,认识和研究网络搜索引擎有着非常重要的现实意义。     

网络食品科学信息资源检索

Internet上蕴藏着丰富的食品信息资源,本文详细介绍了利用搜索引擎、各种数据库、专业网站以及学科导航系统等工具检索食品科技电子文献信息的途径和方法。     

一种改进的信息检索方法

在数据库系统的基础上，利用模糊数学的方法和工具对传统信息检索进行扩充，从而得到一种改进的信息检索方法。主要包括：提出解决问题的方法、选择实用性强的数据库系统、确定接近于自然语言的隶属函数、构造含模糊化的SQL命令并加以实现。     

Personalized multi-period tour recommendations

During a trip planning, tourists gather information from different sources, select and rank the places to visit according to their personal interests, and try to devise daily tours among them. This paper addresses the complex selection and touring problem and proposes a “filter-first, tour-second” framework for generating personalized tour recommendations for tourists based on information from social media and other online data sources. Collaborative filtering is applied to identify a subset of optional points of interest that maximize the potential satisfaction, while there are some preselected mandatory points that the tourists must visit. Next, the underlying orienteering problem is solved via an Iterated Tabu Search algorithm. The goal is to generate tours that contain all mandatory points and maximize the total score collected from the optional points visited daily, taking into account different day availabilities and opening hours, limitations on the tour lengths, budgets and other restrictions. Computational experiments on benchmark datasets indicate that the proposed touring algorithm is very competitive. Furthermore, the proposed framework has been evaluated on data collected from Foursquare. The results show the practical utility and the temporal efficacy of the recommended tours.     

Searching for empirical linkages between demographic structure and economic growth

Demographic structure could affect economic growth through many channels. However, little is known about how demographic structure affects economic growth since no study has examined an extensive collection of channels through which demographic structure could affect economic growth in a single context. This paper overcomes this limitation by examining 45 potential mediating variables between demographic structure and economic growth. A causal search algorithm is used to identify channels through which demographic structure affects economic growth. Our results suggest that demographic structure affects economic growth differently between developed and developing countries. For developed countries, we find that an increase in the share of middle-aged workers has a positive effect on economic growth through institutions, investment and education channels. On the other hand, an increase in the share of the senior population has a negative effect on economic growth through institutions and investment channels. For developing countries, we find (but with weak evidence) that an increase in the share of young workers has a negative effect on economic growth through investment, financial market development and trade channels.     

Neighborhood quality and labor market outcomes: Evidence from quasi-random neighborhood assignment of immigrants

Settlement in a socially deprived neighborhood may hamper individual labor market outcomes because of lack of employed or highly skilled contacts. I investigate this hypothesis by exploiting a unique natural experiment that occurred between 1986 and 1998 when refugee immigrants to Denmark were assigned to municipalities quasi-randomly, which successfully addresses the methodological problem of endogenous neighborhood selection. I show that individuals sort into neighborhoods. Taking account of location sorting, living in a socially deprived neighborhood does not affect labor market outcomes of refugee men. Their labor market outcomes are also not affected by the overall employment rate and the overall average skill level in the neighborhood. However, an increase in the average skill level of non-Western immigrant men living in the neighborhood raises their employment probability, while an increase in the employment rate of co-national men living in the neighborhood raises their real annual earnings. This provides quasi-experimental evidence that residence-based job information networks are ethnically stratified.     

A decision method for supplier selection in multi-service outsourcing

Although supplier selection in multi-service outsourcing is a very important decision problem, research concerning this issue is still relatively scarce. This paper proposes a decision method for selecting a pool of suppliers for the provision of different service process/product elements. It pioneers the use of collaborative utility between partner firms for supplier selection. A multi-objective model is built to select desired suppliers. This model is proved to be NP-hard, so we develop a multi-objective algorithm based on Tabu search for solving it. We then use an example to show the applicability of the proposed model and algorithm. Extensive computational experiments are also conducted to further test the performance of the proposed algorithm.