The Overeducation Phenomenon in Europe
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/ris.2008.02.01Keywords:
Conditional Distribution of Wages, European Community Household Panel, Pay-penalty, Quantile Regression, Unobservable Variables.Abstract
The overeducation literature has typically assumed that the effect of overeducation on wages is constant across the conditional wage distribution. In this paper we use quantile regression and data from a group of European countries to show that differences across segments of the distribution are indeed large. We find significant differences between sexes, in the sense that it is not true that in countries where men are penalised more severely, women are also severely penalised. Moreover, different trends are observed depending on the country and sex. For example in Germany, the wage penalty for overeducation is higher among women than men. Furthermore, while the wage penalty for men increases from decile 10 to decile 90, the wage penalty decreases for women. In Spain, women are more severely penalised for overeducation than men and the effect of overeducation is quite homogeneous across deciles for both men and women.
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