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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how precarious conditions at work affect older workers’ decision about their planned age of retirement.

Different theoretical approaches on the decision to retire are investigated in order to ascertain whether precarious employment extends, or not, one’s working life. A rich data set including over 250,000 old workers across EU-15 is built for the empirical investigation.

The results suggest that old workers involved in precarious employment are planning to retire later than those who are engaged with more stable and regular jobs. However, lack of training as well as poor health conditions at work are found to be associated with early retirement.

The analysis conceptually associates two key features of modern labour markets (precariousness and retirement) and empirically provides some evidence of the effect of poor employment conditions on the decision to retire.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which differences in the subject of degree studied by male and female university graduates contributes to the gender pay gap in Greece, an EU country with historically large gender discrepancies in earnings and occupational segregation. In addition, the paper explores the reasons underlying the distinct educational choices of men and women, with particular emphasis on the role of wage uncertainty.

Using micro‐data from the Greek Labour Force Survey (LFS), Oaxaca‐Blinder decompositions are employed to detect the extent to which gender differences in the type of degree studied can explain the male‐female pay gap. “Risk‐augmented earnings functions” are also used to examine the differential wage premiums offered to men and women in Greece in response to the uncertainty associated with different fields of study.

It is found that the subjects in which women are relatively over‐represented (e.g. Education, Humanities) are also those with the lowest wage returns. Gender differences in the type of degree studied can therefore explain an additional 8.4 per cent of the male‐female pay gap in Greece. A potential reason for distinct gender educational choices is that women opt for less uncertain educations that consequently command lower wage premiums in the job market.

The findings suggest that the promotion of gender equality in Greece should pay closer attention to removing informal barriers to entry for women in educational fields traditionally chosen by men (e.g. more effective careers advice, work‐experience placements, matching of young girls with professional “mentors”).

The paper is the first to investigate the contribution of individual's field of study to the gender wage gap in Greece. In addition, it includes the first‐ever estimations of “risk‐augmented earnings equations” for that country.

This paper investigates the prevalence and distribution of under-skilling across Europe. First, in order to understand why under-skilling occurs, three main theoretical approaches are discussed: (a) Inefficient signaling, (b) Skill shortages, and (c) On-the-job training substitution. Second, in order to measure the real dimension of the problem, we use the Cedefop European Skills and Jobs Survey (ESJS) ¹ to assess whether workers’ skills were lower than required at the point they started their job. Our results are rather mixed. First, we find under-skilling being related to some academic fields such as Health & Medicine, and Engineering. Second, we find that under-skilling is more prevalent among, not surprisingly, young workers but, rather unexpectedly, among permanent workers working in high-skilled occupations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent and determinants of the so-called precarious employment across Europe and using different measures and based on individual’s self-assessment.

Data on over two million workers across Europe (EU-15) from the European Union Labour Force Survey are utilised and a Heckman selection approach is adopted.

About one tenth of the total European workforce is in employment relationships that could be related to precariousness. The sources of precariousness are mainly involuntary part-time and temporary work. Less prominent as a source of precariousness is job insecurity related to fear of job loss. Vulnerable groups are found to have a higher risk of precariousness while significant country variations indicate that precariousness cannot be examined in isolation of the national context. Finally, signals of previous employment inability, such as lack of past working experience, as well as the state of labour market significantly increase the risk of precarious work.

The present study utilises a large-scale survey in order to investigate the incidence of precarious employment in a harmonised way and produce results that are comparable across EU-15 countries.