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This paper uses data from the Cedefop European Skills and Jobs survey (ESJS) (Cedefop, 2014, ESJS microdata are Cedefop copyright and are reproduced with the permission of Cedefop. Further information is available at Cedefop, 2015), a new international dataset on skill mismatch of adult workers in 28 EU countries, to decompose the wage penalty of overeducated workers. The ESJ survey allows for integration of a rich set of variables in the estimation of the effect of overeducation on earnings, such as individuals’ job search motives and the skill needs of their jobs. Oaxaca decomposition techniques are employed to uncover the extent to which the earnings penalties of overeducated workers can be attributed to either (i) individual human capital attributes, (ii) job characteristics, (iii) information asymmetries, (iv) compensating job attributes, or (iv) assignment to jobs with different skill needs. Differences in human capital and job-skill requirements are important factors in explaining the wage premium. It is found that asymmetry of information accounts for a significant part of the overeducation wage penalty of tertiary education graduates, whereas job characteristics and the low skill content of their jobs can explain most of the wage gap for medium-qualified employees. Little evidence is found in favor of equilibrium theories of compensating wage differentials and career mobility. Accepting that much remains to be learned with regards to the drivers of overeducation, this paper provides evidence in support of the need for customized policy responses to tackle overeducation.

This paper contributes to the literature on overeducation by empirically investigating the wage penalty of job–education mismatch among PhD holders who completed their studies in Italy; a country where the number of new doctoral recipients has dramatically increased over recent years while personnel employed in R&D activities is still below the European average. We use cross-sectional micro-data collected in 2009 and rely on different definitions of education–job mismatch such as, overeducation, overskilling, and dissatisfaction with the use of skills. We find that overeducation and skills dissatisfaction are associated with significantly lower wages but there is no wage penalty from overskilling. Furthermore, those who simultaneously report overeducation and skills dissatisfaction experience a particularly high wage penalty.

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.

This paper provides more insight into the assumption of human capital theory that the productivity of job-related training is driven by the improvement of workers’ skills. We analyze the extent to which training and informal learning on the job are related to employee skill development and consider the heterogeneity of this relationship with respect to workers’ skill mismatch at job entry. Using data from the 2014 European Skills and Jobs Survey, we find – as assumed by human capital theory – that employees who participated in training or informal learning show greater improvement of their skills than those who did not. The contribution of informal learning to employee skill development appears to be larger than that of training participation. Nevertheless, both forms of learning are shown to be complementary. This complementarity between training and informal learning is related to a significant additional improvement of workers’ skills. The skill development of workers who were initially underskilled for their job seems to benefit the most from both training and informal learning, whereas the skill development of those who were initially overskilled benefits the least. Work-related learning investments in the latter group seem to be more functional in offsetting skill depreciation than in fostering skill accumulation.

Can having more education than a job requires reduce one’s chances of being offered the job? We study this question in a sample of applications to jobs that are posted on an urban Chinese website. We find that being overqualified in this way does not reduce the success rates of university-educated jobseekers applying to college-level jobs, but that it does hurt college-educated workers’ chances when applying to jobs requiring technical school, which involves three fewer years of education than college. Our results highlight a difficult situation faced by the recent large cohort of college-educated Chinese workers: They seem to fare poorly in the competition for jobs, both when pitted against more-educated university graduates and less-educated technical school graduates.

The relationship between overqualified labor and productivity is questioned in this study. By overqualified labor, it is meant that the labor has more capabilities (education) than the qualifications required by the task. In some cases, like this case, the qualifications of the employees and the qualifications required by the job may not match, and their reflection on productivity may be positive or negative. In the studies conducted in developing countries, such as this study, which reveal the negative relationship of overqualified and low-skilled employees with productivity, unlike the situation in developed countries, has been tried to be explained in this research based on relative deprivation and person–work cohesion. Literature review method is used within the frames of given theories.

This paper explores the link between skill and qualification mismatch and labor productivity using cross-country industry data for 19 OECD countries. Utilizing mismatch indicators aggregated from micro-data sourced from the recent OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), the main results suggest that higher skill and qualification mismatch is associated with lower labor productivity, with over-skilling and under-qualification accounting for most of these impacts. A novel result is that higher skill mismatch is associated with lower labor productivity through a less efficient allocation of resources, presumably because when the share of over-skilled workers is higher, more productive firms find it more difficult to attract skilled labor and gain market shares at the expense of less productive firms. At the same time, a higher share of under-qualified workers is associated with both lower allocative efficiency and within-firm productivity – that is, a lower ratio of high productivity to low productivity firms. While differences in managerial quality can potentially account for the relationship between mismatch and within-firm productivity, the paper offers some preliminary insights into the policy factors that might explain the link between skill mismatch and resource allocation.

Advanced education is often thought to respond to the demands of the economy, market forces create new occupations, and then universities respond with new degrees and curricula aimed at training future workers with specific new skills. Presented here is comparative research on an underappreciated, yet growing, concurrent alternative process: universities, with their global growth in numbers and enrollments, in concert with expanding research capacity, create and privilege knowledge and skills, legitimate new degrees that then become monetized and even required in private and public sectors of economies. A process referred to as academization of occupations has far-reaching implications for understanding the transformation of capitalism, new dimensions of social inequality, and resulting stratification among occupations. Academization is also eclipsing the more limited professionalization processes in occupations. Additionally, it fuels further expansion of advanced education and contributes to a new culture of work in the 21st century. Commissioned detailed German and US case studies of the university origins and influence on workplace consequences of seven selected occupations and associated knowledge, skills, and degrees investigate the academization process. And to demonstrate how universal this could become, the cases contrast the more open and less-restrictive education and occupation system in the US with the centralized and state-controlled education system in Germany. With expected variation, both economies and their occupational systems show evidence of robust academization. Importantly too is evidence of academic transformations of understandings about approaches to job tasks and use of authoritative knowledge in occupational activities.