Employment quality of young workers in Europe and its determinants

In many studies, the smoothness of transition systems is evaluated by referring to the employment status at a given endpoint, for example, youth (un)employment rate. Rarely is the quality of employment taken into account. In this chapter we calculate indices referring to four dimensions of employment quality of young individuals - task discretion (autonomy) at work, skills utilization, perceived job security, opportunities for professional development - with the use of data from the European Working Conditions Survey, in order to characterize the quality of the school-to-work transition in 28 EU countries. In the second part of the chapter we verify which individual- and country-level variables influence the employment quality of young individuals. The set of macro-level determinants includes indices characterizing the education system, employment protection legislation, active and passive labour market policies, industrial relations and the broader economic environment. The model is estimated with the use of two-level random intercept logit models.