Individual returns to education in the Spanish tourism sector during the economic crisis

This paper analyses individual returns to education in the Spanish tourism sector. The results, which are robust to different specifications of Mincer earnings regressions, show that the earnings returns to schooling for tourism workers are only half those for all other sectors, and that the difference in returns between these two groups has increased significantly during the economic crisis. This has happened at a time when the earnings range between those with lower and higher qualifications has narrowed in tourism while it has remained stable in other sectors, and when tourism has been capable of retaining most of its workforce while the rest of the economy has experienced a sharp decrease in employment.

Capital humano y turismo: rendimiento educativo, desajuste y satisfacción laboral

El capital humano es un elemento clave para el logro de objetivos en términos de competitividad y crecimiento del sector de turismo en España. En este trabajo se utilizan datos muy recientes (procedentes de la Encuesta de Calidad de Vida en el Trabajo, ECVT) para abordar tres aspectos fundamentales en su análisis: el rendimiento educativo que los trabajadores obtienen a cambio de la inversión que realizan en su formación reglada; la medición de los niveles de desajuste entre dicha formación y los puestos de trabajo que ocupan, y su relación con el salario; y, por último, el análisis de diversas dimensiones de la satisfacción laboral y de la relación que se establece entre ellas y la sobre-educación de los trabajadores.

Exploring the relationship between educational mismatch, earnings and job satisfaction in the tourism industry

This article analyses the interrelationship between educational mismatch, wages and job satisfaction in the Spanish tourism sector in the first years of the global economic crisis. It is shown that there is a much higher incidence of over-education among workers in the Spanish tourism sector than in the rest of the economy despite this sector recording lower educational levels. This study estimates two models to analyse the influence of the educational mismatch on wages and job satisfaction for workers in the tourism industry and for the Spanish economy as a whole. The first model shows that in the tourism sector, the wage penalty associated with over-education is approximately 10%. The second reveals that in the tourism sector the levels of satisfaction of over-educated workers are considerably lower than those corresponding to workers well assigned. With respect to the differences between tourism and the overall economy in both aspects, the wage penalty is substantially lower in the case of tourism industries and the effect of over-education on job satisfaction is very similar to that of the economy as a whole in a context where both wages and the private returns to education are considerably lower in the tourism sector.

Parametric & nonparametric approaches to event studies: an application to a hotel’s market value

The main objective of this paper is twofold: on the one hand, to analyse the impact that the announcement of the opening of a new hotel has on the performance of its chain by carrying out an event study, and on the other hand, to compare the results of two different approaches to this method: a parametric specification based on the autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity models to estimate the market model, and a nonparametric approach, which implies employing Theil’s nonparametric regression technique, which in turn, leads to the so-called complete nonparametric approach to event studies. The results that the empirical application arrives at are noteworthy as, on average, the reaction to such news releases is highly positive, both approaches reaching the same level of significance. However, a word of caution must be said when one is not only interested in detecting whether the market reacts, but also in obtaining an exhaustive calculation of the abnormal returns to further examine its determining factors.