Skills and inequality have long been a central theme in analyses of social structure and economic development. A Research Agenda for Skills and Inequality offers an insightful cross-disciplinary framework for research on how unequal living conditions form, persist and change in interplay with human skill formation and development.

The links between skills and inequality have long been a central theme inanalyses of social structure and economic development; in recent years bothacademic and political interest in this topic has grown rapidly. For more thanhalf a century, human capital theory has been a cornerstone in analyses ofeconomic development at both the individual and societal level. Despite itsgreat importance, however, the traditional human capital model is incompletein a number of crucial respects. It needs contributions from other disciplinesin order to accurately account for broader inequalities within and across coun-tries. The present volume provides an overview of recent advances in researchon skills and inequality against the backdrop of established insights fromrelated but separate fields of inquiry; mainly economics and sociology but alsophilosophy, human resource management, political science and psychology.By bringing these advances and insights together, we aim to build a new frame-work for research on how unequal living conditions are formed, persist andchange in interplay with human skill formation and development.

The occupational structure of a society can be summarized with indicators of the work tasks involved and the requirements of their performance. Tasks are indicated by work oriented towards people, data and things, respectively, while the skill level of jobs is indicated by educational requirements. On the basis of data from the Swedish Level of Living Survey (LNU) 2010 we find that the work content indicators form a two-dimensional structural space. A vertical axis has high-skill work and data or management tasks at one end and low-skill work and production tasks at the other end. A horizontal axis has relational (people-oriented) work at one end and production (things-oriented) work at the other end and is unrelated to skill level. These two dimensions are strongly tied to class (vertical axis) and gender (horizontal axis), although standard class categories and sex distributions are not included among the indicators forming the space.

Existing approaches to determine the ideological positions of political parties are almost exclusively based on either (a) data on the explicit views of citizens, voters or experts or (b) textual analyses of party programs, manifestos or other documents from the parties themselves. Here, we suggest and apply an alternative approach. We estimate associations between political parties using only the variation in party vote shares across nominal geographical areas (constituencies or districts). The presumed mechanism that empirically links nominal districts with their distribution of party votes is that differences between districts in population structure are strongly and systematically associated with individual motives driving party choice. But these structural and individual traits need not be directly observed in order to distinguish party political dimensions. We apply this approach to Sweden from the first election with universal suffrage in 1921 to the most recent election in 2022, altogether 30 elections covering a full century of political democracy. In close to all elections, two main dimensions of inter-party correlations emerge. One of the two is a classical left-right dimension, with social democrats at one end and conservatives at the other. A second dimension differentiates between center and periphery, or urban and rural areas, with socialists, greens and to some extent liberals at one end and rural parties at the other. The center-periphery (or perhaps modern-traditional) dimension appears related to the more recently distinguished GAL/TAN scale. Our findings indicate that this dimension, far from being new, has played a significant role across the entire century of democracy in Sweden. We conclude by noting that data on aggregate election results by geographical districts are readily available for almost all countries in the world across very long time periods. The suggested approach can thus be globally useful in expanding knowledge on party political structures and their change.

A recurrent finding in on‐the‐job training research is the ‘training gap’ in formal training: the positive correlation between initial education and continuing training. This finding is here examined from the perspective of two important distinctions: (i) between employee skill supply and job skill demand and (ii) between formal and informal training. Less‐educated workers may hold jobs with low skill requirements demanding little further formal training because the use of high skills is irrelevant, jobs that moreover provide little informal training. Exploring these issues on representative Swedish survey data using the educational mismatch (overqualified, the rightly qualified and the underqualified) model, we find that job requirements are strongly correlated with the incidence of both formal and informal training. Rather than, as has previously been argued, employee training decisions being the cause of the gap, this suggests that employer decisions regarding how to structure jobs and whom to hire are the primary factors behind the training gap.

Across European countries, immigrants are disadvantaged in labor market attainment relative to natives: foreign-born individuals are less likely to be employed and more likely to be unemployed. Previous research indicates that immigrants’ employment chances are better when the share of low-skill jobs in the labor market is large. Upgrading of the job structure, which has taken place in many countries over recent decades, might therefore have hurt immigrants’ employment prospects. However, an exclusive focus on skill demand neglects another important development in the skill structure of advanced economies: educational expansion. The rapid rise in skill supply has tended to outpace the decline in the low-skill job share with increasing over-education as a consequence, potentially leading to crowding-out of immigrant workers from employment. Based on data from the European Union Labour Force Surveys (EU-LFS) 2004-2016, we perform analyses that jointly consider the demand and supply sides of labor markets. Our results indicate that the size of the low-skill job sector is positively related to immigrants’ employment if and only if those employed in the low-skill sector have low qualifications. In economies with high rates of over-education, where many well-educated natives occupy low-skill jobs, the labor market prospects of immigrants deteriorate.

In many advanced industrial countries, in Europe and beyond, marginal groups in the labor market are facing increasing difficulties in finding employment. Structural skill upgrading might hurt employment prospects of marginal workers whose relative lack of experience makes them vulnerable in job competition with more established workers. Empirical results, based on data from the EU Labour Force Surveys for 20 countries over the period 1998 to 2016, show that both matched skill upgrading and overeducation have a clear negative impact on the employment chances of youth and immigrants, while older workers and mothers appear less affected by structural skill change.

Labor market prospects for youth have deteriorated significantly in many OECD countries over recent decades. While the extent and consequences of falling youth employment are commonly studied, attempts at understanding its causes have been much more limited. The present paper attempts to fill this explanatory gap. We suggest that the secular decline in youth employment can be accounted for by the structural change of skill. This process of structural change has two interrelated components: (a) one part where skill supply (individual educational attainment) and skill demand (educational requirements of jobs) grow together in what can be called matched upgrading and (b) another part where excess skill supply leads to mismatch and crowding-out. These components of skill growth have commonly been treated separately and incompletely in the literature. We build on both of them in developing our account of why the labor market for youth has weakened. Using data on 10 European countries from the EU Labor Force Surveys over the period 1998 to 2015, we estimate associations between the structural change of skill and youth employment decline. The main conclusion is that both matched skill upgrading and overeducation are strongly and negatively linked to young people’s employment chances.