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Este paper investiga os efeitos salariais do overeducation, situação na qual trabalhadores exercem funções com escolaridade requerida inferior. Para isso, utilizou-se dados de graduados da Universidade Federal da Paraíba de 2003 a 2013. A estimação de um OLS com efeitos fixos dos indivíduos e das firmas, mais interações destes com o tempo como forma de captar os fatores não observados time varying mostrou que egressos overeducated auferem em média um salário menor que seus pares com bom match entre instrução e ocupação. A regressão quantílica mostrou que este efeito penaliza em maior grau os indivíduos nos quantis superiores da distribuição de salários, enfraquecendo a hipótese que liga o overeducation a menores níveis de habilidade.

This study estimates the stigma effect of unemployment and overeducation within one framework. We conduct a randomised field experiment in which we send out trios of fictitious job applications, from male candidates with no relevant work experience, to real vacancies. One candidate graduated just a few months before the application, the two others graduated a year earlier and had been unemployed or underemployed since that time. By monitoring the subsequent callback, we find evidence of a larger stigma effect of unemployment than overeducation. The stigma effect of overeducation is found to occur for permanent contract jobs but not for temporary ones.

There is limited large-scale empirical research into the working lives of adults who have an autism spectrum disorder with no co-occurring intellectual disability. Drawing on data from a national survey, this report describes the employment activities and experiences of 130 adults with Asperger’s Disorder (AD) and high functioning autism (HFA) in Australia. Outcome measures include current occupation; occupational skill level and alignment with educational attainment; type of job contract; hours of work; support received to find work; support received in the workplace; and positive and negative experiences of employment. The findings confirm and expand upon existing evidence that adults with AD and HFA, despite their capacity and willingness to work, face significant disadvantages in the labour market and a lack of understanding and support in employment settings.

This paper explores occupational and employment mobility over the previous decade in Greece and contributes to a better understanding of the consequences of the sovereign debt crisis. Our findings suggest that downward mobility was the common trend in intra-generational occupational mobility during the first period of the crisis. Significant changes occurred between 2011-2015. The recovery is apparent during the third bailout program with higher upward occupational and employment movements. However, polarization in the middle-paid professions was noticed. Additionally, this paper highlights the role of education in career mobility and the problem of overeducation. The empirical results reveal that tertiary graduates were more likely to move downward during the first period of the crisis even though overeducated workers had more possibilities to experience upward mobility. Overeducation in Greece seems to be the result of the increasing number of tertiary graduates, low proportion of high-skilled job positions and high levels of unemployment.

The methodological debate on how to measure overeducation has been present since the introduction of the topic in the academic debate. Nevertheless, there is still no consensus on a preferred indicator. This article aims at contributing to the existing methodological debate providing systematic and cross-country evidence on the variation across overeducation measurements. Using REFLEX/HEGESCO and EULFS datasets, I provide evidence on within and across countries variation on the incidence, correlation and overlaps across the main types of objective, statistical and subjective overeducation indicators. Results suggest that worker’s self-reported indicators better cope with comparative studies, while in single-country studies objective indicators are likely to provide a more in-depth and detailed measurement. The use of statistical indicators is advised in contexts with labour markets that easily adapt to educational and employment changes, especially if these are not affected by credential inflation. However, it is advisable to use more than one indicator whenever data allows it, as different types of overeducation measurements provide different outcomes and results are likely to be complementary rather than excluding information on the overeducation phenomenon. This is especially relevant when overeducation is used as a dependent variable rather than a predictor. An initial review and discussion of the existing types of overeducation measurements and their advantages and drawbacks precedes the empirical evidence.

Concerns over the supply of skills in the U.S. labor force, especially education-related skills, have exploded in recent years with a series of reports not only from employer-associated organizations but also from independent and even government sources making similar claims. These complaints about skills are driving much of the debate around labor force and education policy, yet they have not been examined carefully. In this article, the author assesses the range of these charges as well as other evidence about skills in the labor force. Very little evidence is consistent with the complaints about a skills shortage, and a wide range of evidence suggests the complaints are not warranted. Indeed, a reasonable conclusion is that overeducation remains the persistent and even growing condition of the U.S. labor force with respect to skills. The author considers three possible explanations for the employer complaints and the associated policy implications.

Occupational mismatch has been a hot topic in the economics literature in recent decades; however, no consensus has been reached on how to conceptualise and measure this phenomenon. We explore the unique opportunity offered by the PIAAC survey to measure occupational mismatch at the individual level based on both education- (overeducation) and skill-based (overskilling) variables by using both objective and subjective measures. For this purpose, we use data on 17 European countries and compute up to 20 different indicators of occupational mismatch. We find that the conceptualisation and measurement of occupational mismatch are indeed important and that education and skill mismatch do not measure the same phenomenon. In fact, only a small percentage of mismatched individuals are mismatched with respect to both education and skill, whereas the majority are mismatched with respect to either education or skill only. At the country level, we find a negative correlation between the incidence of education and skill mismatch, which has important implications for policies aiming to address this labour market inefficiency.

We analyse how immigrants’ level of social assimilation is related to their labour market outcomes. More precisely, we estimate the association between assimilation and employment, wages, underemployment, three measures of job satisfaction, overeducation and wages. Using Australian longitudinal data, we find that assimilation is strongly associated with employment and wages as well as a number of job satisfaction measures. We then split our data and repeat the analysis for before and after the financial crisis of 2008–2009. We find important differences in the way assimilation is associated with different measures of labour market outcomes under different economic conditions. Finally, we explore mechanisms that may underlie the results.

This paper takes account of skills heterogeneity among workers with a higher education degree and proposes a new measure to differentiate between real and apparent overeducation based on the level of cognitive skills actually achieved by the individuals. This proposal is applied to the study of the wage effects of overeducation in the Spanish labor market using data from PIAAC. The results suggest that between a quarter and a half of the graduate workers who appear to be overeducated in the Spanish labor market could be considered as being only apparently overeducated since they show a lower level of skills than that corresponding to their educational level or, alternatively, a level of cognitive skills which is commensurate with their job. Different returns are found for each group of overeducated individuals both when compared with adequately educated peers within a similar level of education (with greater wage penalties for apparently overeducated workers) and when the comparison is done with well-matched co-workers doing a similar job (with a wage premium for real overeducation but no significant returns for apparently overeducated workers). These different returns by skill levels beyond what overeducation measures implies that the market distinguishes between education and skills and that educational attainment per se does not perfectly align with acquired skills, meaning that traditional measures of overeducation would overstate the actual level of skills mismatch in the labor market.

This essay delivers two main innovations with respect to the existing literature. First, and foremost, by extending the work of Nicaise (2010) relative to the reservation wage to the case of overeducation, we propose a statistical test to discriminate between alternative theoretical interpretations of the determinants of overeducation through the Heckman sample selection procedure. Second, the essay provides the first available economic analysis of the consequences of the educational mismatch in Italy as based on AlmaLaurea data, the largest and richest data bank available in the country. The data includes a large number of university graduates enrolled in a given year before the Bologna reform and asks a large number of questions allowing us measuring among others the quality of education from high school. This wealth of information is a condition to provide the most comprehensive, accurate and reliable assessment of overeducation in the country. The educational mismatch 5 years from graduation is relatively high—at 11.4 and 8% for overeducation and overskilling, respectively—by EU standards. Ceteris paribus the parents of the mismatched have lower educational levels according to school tracking. Most humanities and social sciences degrees but also geology, biology and psychology are associated with both types of mismatch. The quality of education also correlates to the educational mismatch. We find a non-conditional wage penalty associated to overeducation and overskilling of 20 and 16% and a conditional one of about 12 and 7%, respectively. The Heckman sample selection model returns a slightly higher sample selection corrected wage penalty, supporting not only the job competition and job assignment models, but also the human capital model. Other concurrent statistical tests point to the difficulty that the educational system faces in providing work-related skills to graduates.