Occupational change in Europe after the Great Recession

Abstract

This paper empirically explores the occupational change in Europe after the 2008-crisis (the Great Recession). During this period, which has remained relatively unexplored by the literature so far, many European economies have implemented profound institutional changes in their labor markets and transformed their growth models. Using individual-level data from 18 economies, we build three indicators of job quality -the average educational attainment, the median earnings, and an index of job instability based on the contractual characteristics of the job- and analyze the relative employment growth of jobs. Our findings suggest that there is not a unique pattern of occupational change in Europe, in opposition to the mainstream view of pervasive polarization. On the contrary, we detect a variety of occupational change profiles, which even differ within the same country depending on the indicator employed.