Vocational vs. General Education and Employment over the Life Cycle: New Evidence from PIAAC

Not obtained at abstract depth; PIAAC 2012 international sample

PIAAC 2012 adults across participating countries.

The identical difference-in-differences-across-ages design as Hanushek et al. (2017), applied to PIAAC instead of IALS, by an overlapping author team. It inherits the identification problem wholesale: no exogenous variation in education type, and age confounded with cohort in a cross-section. Its value to the archive is narrow — it shows the descriptive age pattern is not an artefact of the 1990s IALS data. It is NOT independent confirmation of the causal claim, which is why independence is recorded as developer-involved.

An initial employment advantage for vocational education turns into a disadvantage later in life, with the results strongest in apprenticeship countries with the highest intensity of industry-based vocational education. Confirms the descriptive pattern in 2012 data.

HIGH. Same design as Hanushek et al.: people who chose different tracks, compared across ages in a cross-section.

A same-author extension of Hanushek et al. (2017) to newer data, not an independent replication. Woessmann is an author on both.