Search results

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and explain the factors contributing to the observed differences in skill mismatches (vertical and horizontal) between natives and immigrants in EU countries.

Using microdata from the 2007 wave of the Adult Education Survey (AES), different probit models are specified and estimated to analyse differences in the probability of each type of skill mismatch between natives and immigrants. Yun’s decomposition method is used to identify the relative contribution of characteristics and returns to explain the differences between the two groups.

Immigrants are more likely to be skill mismatched than natives. The difference is much larger for vertical mismatch, wherein the difference is higher for immigrants coming from non-EU countries than for those coming from other EU countries. The authors find that immigrants from non-EU countries are less valued in EU labour markets than natives with similar characteristics – a result that is not observed for immigrants from EU countries. These results could be related to the limited transferability of human capital acquired in non-EU countries.

The findings suggest that specific programmes to adapt immigrants’ human capital acquired in the home country are required to reduce differences in the incidence of skill mismatch and better integration into EU labour markets.

This research is original, because it distinguishes between horizontal and vertical mismatch – an issue that has not been considered in the literature on differences between native and immigrant workers and due to the wide geographical scope of the analysis, which considers EU and non-EU countries.

Employment mismatch is a significant problem in many countries. However, little conceptualization research has been conducted on employment mismatch from a social justice perspective. The purpose of this study is to shed light on social justice issues that have been obscured in the human resource development (HRD) literature through the lens of the distributive justice theory.

This study first reviews the literature to identify the gaps in employment mismatch research by reviewing three relevant bodies of literature: education mismatch, immigrant mismatch and disability mismatch. It then provides a new conceptualization of employment mismatch by examining employment mismatch through the lens of Rawls’ (1971) distributive justice theory.

The author proposed a framework of healthy employment relations using the constructs of social system design, moral guidance, education reform and individual development. Implications were proposed for research and practice.

The new framework of healthy employment approaches employment mismatch from four aspects embraced by the distributive justice theory. This model can assist HRD professionals and policymakers in responding to the employment mismatch of different populations.

The payoff to schooling among the foreign born in the United States is only around one-half of the payoff for the native born. This paper examines whether this differential is related to the quality of the schooling immigrants acquired abroad. The paper uses the overeducation/required education/undereducation specification of the earnings equation to explore the transmission mechanism for the origin-country school-quality effects. It also assesses the empirical merits of two alternative measures of the quality of schooling undertaken abroad. The results suggest that a higher quality of schooling acquired abroad is associated with a higher payoff to schooling among immigrants in the US labor market. This higher payoff is associated with a higher payoff to correctly matched schooling in the United States, and a greater (in absolute value) penalty associated with years of undereducation. A set of predictions is presented to assess the relative importance of these channels, and the undereducation channel is shown to be the more influential factor. This channel is linked to greater positive selection in migration among those from countries with better quality schools. In other words, it is the impact of origin-country school quality on the immigrant selection process, rather than the quality of immigrants' schooling per se, that is the major driver of the lower payoff to schooling among immigrants in the United States.

The purpose of this paper is to study the level of job satisfaction among Australian immigrants relative to the native-born over time as a measure of their labour market assimilation.

Using the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia panel data set, six measures of job satisfaction are tested using the random effects Generalised Least Squares method with a Mundlak correction. Labour market assimilation is defined by “years since arrival” and also via cohort effects.

The authors find statistical evidence of general job dissatisfaction amongst immigrants in Australia relative to the native-born, driven mainly by non-English Speaking Background (NESB) immigrants, though this dissipates for long-term immigrants, irrespective of English Speaking Background (ESB) or NESB status. Econometric results strengthen these results though improvements over time are only strongly evident for NESB immigrants, whilst results for ESB immigrants remain mixed, and is dependent on the definition of “assimilation”.

This paper extends the immigrant labour market assimilation literature by introducing job satisfaction as a measure of assimilation.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an improved concept of educational mismatch that combines a statistical measure of over- and undereducation with the worker’s self-assessment of skill utilization. The novelty of this measurement approach consists in identifying the vertical and horizontal nature of skills mismatch, that is, a mismatch in which skills are either over/underutilized or not utilized.

Cross-sectional data from the Swiss Household Panel survey for the years 1999 and 2004 are used to determine the true extent of educational mismatch among workers. Moroever, different versions of the Duncan and Hoffman wage equation are estimated depending on whether basic or alternative measures of educational mismatch are included.

The empirical analyses provide the following results: first, at least two-third of the statistically defined overeducated workers perceive their skills as adequate for the job they hold and are then apparently overeducated; second, overeducated workers whose skills are not related to the job do not receive any payoff to years of surplus education; and third, apparently overeducated workers have similar wage returns compared to others with the same schooling level but who are statistically matched. All in all, these findings confirm that most of those overeducated according to the statistical measure have unobserved skills that allow them to work in a job for which they are well-matched.

The paper indicates the need to consider both vertical and horizontal skill mismatches when measuring educational mismatch in the labour market. In that way, it is possible to account for worker heterogeneity in skills whose omission may generate biased estimates of the incidence and wage effects of over- and undereducation.

The purpose of this paper is to break down south-north migration along both the skill and the occupational dimension and thus to distinguish and compare several types of south-north migration and brain drain.

This paper presents south-north migration rates by occupational category at two distinct levels of disaggregation according to International Standard Classification of Occupations 1988 (ISCO-88). The data sets combine information about the labor market outcomes of immigrants in Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) countries around the year 2000 provided by the Database on Immigrants in OECD Countries by the OECD with employment data for the developing migrant-sending countries from the International Labour Organization.

The incidence of south-north migration was highest among Professionals, one of the two occupational categories generally requiring tertiary education, and among clerks and legislators, senior officials and managers. At the more disaggregated level, physical, mathematical and engineering science (associate) professionals, life science and health (associate) professionals, as well as other (associate) professionals exhibited significantly larger brain drain rates than teaching (associate) professionals. The data also suggest non-negligible occupation-education mismatches due to the imperfect transferability of skills acquired through formal education because south-north migrants with a university degree worked more often in occupational categories requiring less than tertiary education compared to OECD natives. The employment shares of most types of professionals and technicians and associate professionals, as well as of clerks and corporate managers were significantly smaller in the migrant-sending countries compared to the receiving countries.

The constructed data sets constitute the first comprehensive data sets on south-north migration by ISCO-88 major and sub-major occupational category for cross-sections of, respectively, 91 and 17 developing countries of emigration.

The wage effect of job–education vertical mismatch (i.e. overeducation) has only recently been investigated in the case of Ph.D. holders. The existing contributions rely on ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates that allow measuring the average effect of being mismatched at the mean of the conditional wage distribution.

The authors implement a recentered influence function (RIF) to estimate the overeducation gap along the entire hourly wage distribution and compare Ph.D. holders who are overeducated with those who are not on a specific sample of Ph.D. holders in different fields of study and European Research Council (ERC) categories. Moreover, the authors compare the overeducation gap between graduates working in the academic and non-academic sector.

The results reveal that overeducation hits the wages of those Ph.D. holders who are employed in the academic sector and in non-research and development (R&D) jobs outside of the academic sector, while no penalty exists among those who carry out R&D activities outside the academia. The size of the penalty is higher among those who are in the mid-top of the wage distribution and hold a Social Science and Humanities specialization.

Two policies could reduce the probability of overeducation: (a) a reallocation of Ph.D. grants from low to high demand fields of study and (b) the diffusion of industrial over academic Ph.Ds.

This paper observes the heterogeneity of the overeducation penalty along the wage distribution and according to Ph.D. holders' study field and sector of employment (academic/non-academic).

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of labor mismatches on wages and on job satisfaction for the Spanish case, with a distinction been made between educational and skills-related measures of mismatch.

The focus is placed on the usage that the individuals do of their skills in the workplace and different measures of skills use are considered to check the robustness of the results.

Using data from PIAAC, the results suggest that whereas educational mismatch shows greater effects on wages, the effects of labor mismatch on job satisfaction are better explained by the relative use of individual skills in the workplace.

Both educational and skills mismatches are relevant for understanding the economic effects of labor mismatch. Nevertheless, it should be taken into account that educational mismatch is not an accurate proxy for skills mismatch, mainly when the non-monetary effects of labor mismatch are addressed.

There is room to increase workers’ skills utilization in the workplace, which, in turn, would contribute to enhance individual job satisfaction and, consequently, workers productivity.

A process of upgrading in the Spanish labor market would allow to take full advantage of recent investments in education and skills formation done in the country in the last decades.

This study contributes to the literature on labor mismatch by explicitly considering that educational and skills mismatch might reflect different phenomena and by analyzing the effects of both types of mismatches on different labor market outcomes.

(a) To examine “native-born/immigrant” (nativity) and “national/foreign professional credentials” (country of credentials) as status factors in terms of expectation states theory, and (b) to lay out a blueprint for a theory-based, experimental research agenda in this area.

(for (b) above). I propose a research program based on three types of expectation states experimental designs: the open group-discussion, the rejection-of-influence standardized setting, and the application-files format. All three incorporate measures of either biased evaluations or double standards for competence, or of both. I illustrate how these designs can be adapted to assess, through the presence/absence of one or the other of those practices, the separate impacts of nativity, country of professional credentials and selected additional factors on the inference of task competence. The need for and the advantages of systematic, experimental work on this topic are highlighted.

(from (a) above). I review evidence of the status value of nativity and country of credentials through data on evaluations, employment, and earnings. My evidence originates in contemporary Canadian studies that present results from surveys, interviews, census records, and – to a lesser extent – experiments, and these findings support my claim.

The proposed research will facilitate the development of interventions toward the standardized and unbiased assessment of immigrants’ foreign credentials.

The agenda I put forth constitutes a novel approach to the study of nativity and country of credentials. The work will extend the expectation states program, and enhance immigration research both theoretically and methodologically.