This study investigates the incidence of over-education amongst recent Australian bachelor degree graduates and its effect on their earnings. We find that between 24% and 37% of graduates were over-educated shortly after course completion, with over-education most common amongst young females and least common amongst older females. Over-education…

This paper proposes a theoretical framework where "within graduates" wage inequality is related to overeducation/educational mismatch in the labor market. We show that wage inequality may arise because of inefficient self-selection into education in the presence of ability-complementary technological progress and asymmetric information…

Using a survey of a cohort of UK graduates, linked to administrative data on higher education participation, this paper investigates the labour market attainment of recent graduates by subject of study. We document a large heterogeneity in the mean wages of graduates from different subjects and a considerably larger one within subject with…

Studies examining the wage effect of overeducation have generated very consistent results. Their findings suggest that, for workers with similar educational attainment, workers who are overeducated for the job suffer from significant wage penalties. However, most studies use cross-sectional data, implicitly assuming that workers are randomly…

This paper examines the effect of teacher relative wages and teacher wage dispersion on high school graduates' preferences for teaching majors in College. This approximation to teacher quality is appropriate in a country like Venezuela as opposed to the US since the rigidity of the tertiary school system significantly limits mobility between…

There is much disagreement in the literature over the extent to which graduates are mismatched in the labour market and the reasons for this. In this paper we utilise the Flexible Professional in the Knowledge Society (REFLEX) data set to cast light on these issues, based on data for UK graduates. We find substantial pay penalties for…

This paper studies the incidence and consequences of the mismatch between formal education and the educational requirements of jobs in Estonia during the years 1997-2003. We find large wage penalties associated with the phenomenon of educational mismatch. Moreover, the incidence and wage penalty of mismatches increase with age. This suggests that…

We report evidence that university reputation affects wages of bachelors in China. An unconditional difference between a top-100 university and a top 400-500 university of 23% is increased to some 28% by adding controls. Within the top-100 there is no differentiation in pay-off. Self-rated quality of high school, while affecting quality of…

Aggregate unemployment may affect individual returns to education through qualification-specific responses in participation and wage bargaining. This paper shows that an increase in regional unemployment by 1% decreases returns to education by 0.005 percentage points. This implies that higher skilled employees are better sheltered from labour…

While there is an extensive literature on intergenerational transmission of economic outcomes (education, health and income for example), many of the pathways through which these outcomes are transmitted are not as well understood. We address this deficit by analysing the relationship between socio-economic status and child outcomes in university,…

Previous research has established the returns to academic ability in the general labor market, and this paper investigates such returns in the teacher labor market. Using a nationally representative sample of public school teachers, I find that teachers who graduate from the most selective undergraduate institutions have salaries that are between…

[Groot and Maassen van den Brink, 2000a] provide a useful summary of the incidence of overeducation and undereducation. Unfortunately, by combining non-compatible estimates of the impact of surplus schooling (and under schooling) on earnings they potentially bias their estimates downward (upward). This paper bypasses this potential bias by…

Empirically determines the components of the gross wage differential between employed Canadian Indians and non-Indians that can be a result of human capital attributes and that which is a result of unexplained factors and labor market discrimination. It is found that much of the wage gap is unexplained by human capital and other observable…

Examines the returns to subbaccalaureate credentials and coursework, using the postsecondary transcripts of the National Longitudinal Study of the Class of 1972. Results indicate substantial variety in the returns and suggest clear differences between the subbaccalaureate labor market and that for individuals with baccalaureate degrees. (56…

The positive impact of education on earnings, wages, and economic growth is well documented; however, the issue of education-occupation matching in developing countries has been largely ignored. Since workers' levels of schooling and their occupations' required level of education both affect wages, policymakers may find it useful to note if such…