Public Conference: “Labour Market and Education Policy Issues in Turkey”, 7 May 2015, SOAS

Date:

Title: “Labour Market and Education Policy Issues in Turkey”

Speakers: Dr. Bilge Eriş Dereli, Visiting Posdoctoral Researcher, University of Warwick and Dr. Burhan Can Karahasan, Visiting Fellow at LSE

Titles of the Talks:
Dr. Bilge Eriş Dereli: Occupational Mobility and Mismatch Unemployment
Dr. Burhan Can Karahasan: “The Effect of Compulsory Schooling on Spatial Distribution of Educational Attainment”
Date: Thursday, 7 May 2015
Time: 18:30-20:00
Venue: B104, Brunei Gallery, SOAS, University of London, WC1H 0XG
Chair: Dr. Jonathan Hill, King’s College London

We are pleased to announce Centre for Policy and Research on Turkey (Research Turkey)’s public conference entitled “Labour Market and Education Policy Issues in Turkey” in which Dr. Bilge Eriş Dereli, Visiting Posdoctoral Researcher, University of Warwick and Dr. Burhan Can Karahasan, Visiting Fellow at LSE and will give talks. This event will take place on Thursday, 7 May 2015 between 6:30p.m. and 8:00p.m. at B104, Brunei Gallery, SOAS, University of London, WC1H 0XG. Dr. Jonathan Hill of King’s College London will kindly chair the event. The event is co-sponsored by SOAS Development Studies, Neoliberalism, Globalisation and States Research Cluster.

You may find the talks’ abstracts as well as the speakers’ biographies below.

This event is free and open to public but it is a ticketed event that requires pre-registration. A ticket does not guarantee a seat. Please click here for free registration and tickets.

Abstracts of the Talks

Dr. Bilge Eriş Dereli: Mismatch Unemployment and Occupational Mobility (co-authored with Thijs van Rens)

There is a lot of talk about skill shortages on the labour market, or skill mismatch (Kocherlakota(2010, Katz(2010)). The idea is that if we could only improve occupational mobility, we would reduce labour market mismatch, increase productivity and reduce unemployment. We explore this idea using the Turkish Household Labour Force Surveys between 2005 and 2012. The Turkish data are particularly suited for our purposes, because the data for unemployed workers include information both about their previously held occupation and the occupation they are currently looking for. Thus, the data allow us to observe the counterfactual labour market allocation if there were no occupational mobility. Our main finding is rather surprising. The preliminary results indicate that unemployed workers move towards high-wage occupations and out of low-wage occupations. This movement does not generate a considerable change in dispersion in wages; however there occurs dispersion in job finding rates across occupations which in the end increases mismatch unemployment. Worker mobility across occupations actually generates the mismatch unemployment and in the light of this finding putting in place worker mobility frictions would reduce unemployment substantially.

Dr. Burhan Can Karahasan: The Effect of Compulsory Schooling on Spatial Distribution of Educational Attainment (co-authored with Alpay Filiztekin)

This paper explores the effect of a change in compulsory schooling on spatial distribution of educational attainment in Turkey. A sudden change in the policy in 1997 increased mandatory years of schooling from five to eight years. Using data on two cohorts, the cohort that had been affected by the change and the immediate cohort that had not, we compare the shifts in the distributions of the share of individuals with compulsory level of education and the share of population that acquired more, voluntary, education. Our findings suggest an increase in the dispersion in voluntary education across space. However, this finding is mostly due to gender differences. Men, especially in urban areas, benefitted more from the change in the law. Moreover, our analysis show that local labour market conditions are important in shaping the distribution and females are more susceptible to such conditions.

Short Biographies of the Speakers and the Chair

Dr. Bilge Eriş Dereli is a lecturer at Marmara University Department of Economics since 2013. She worked as a research assistant at the same department between 2009 and 2013. She is currently a visiting researcher fellow at The University of Warwick, Department of Economics. Shereceived her Bachelor’s degree in Economics at Marmara University (2006) and her PhD degree in Economics at the same university (2013). She studied as a visiting researcher in Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional (CREi) at Universitat Pompeu Fabra for her doctoral thesis research during the 2011-2012 academic year. She has participated projects conducted by The Conference Board and The Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey as a researcher. She has awarded scholarships of The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey and The Council of Higher Education of Turkey during her MA and PhD studies. Her research interests are labour economics, education economics and applied econometrics

Dr. Burhan Can Karahasan is Assistant Professor in Economics at Piri Reis University, Turkey.  Currently he is a Visiting Research Fellow at LSE, European Institute, Research on South Eastern Europe (LSEE). He received his MA degree from Boğaziçi University and PhD degree in Economics from Marmara University. Previously he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Barcelona Grup d’Anàlisi Quantitativa Regional. In 2010, he was granted the Best PhD Thesis award by Turkish Economic Association and in 2013 received the Ibn Khaldun Prize from Middle East Economic Association. Dr Karahasan has mostly published on regional inequality issues in journals such as International Regional Science Review, Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Review of Economics and Finance, Review of Urban and Regional Studies. His current research focuses on the spatial imbalances in human capital development at local level in Turkey and peripheral European Countries.

Dr. Jonathan Hill is Reader in Postcolonialism and the Maghreb in the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London. He joined King’s in 2005 after completing his PhD in the Department of International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He has been a Senior Associate Member of St Antony’s College, University of Oxford and is a member of the ESRC’s Peer Review College. He is a Fellow of the British Society of Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). He has provided expert opinion on North Africa to a range of public and private organisations including the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Ministry of Defence and Department for International Development, Sweden’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the World Energy Council.

ResearchTurkey
ResearchTurkey
AnalizTürkiye

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