Wage Effects of Educational Mismatch According to Workers’ Origin: The Role of Demographics and Firm Characteristics

[en] This paper analyses the wage effects of educational mismatch by workers’ origin using a sizeable, detailed matched employer–employee dataset for Belgium. Relying on a fine-grained approach to measuring educational mismatch, the results show that over-educated workers, regardless of their origin, suffer a wage penalty compared to their well-matched former classmates. However, the magnitude of this wage penalty is found to vary considerably depending on workers’ origin. In addition, the estimates show that origin-based differences in over-education wage penalties significantly depend on both demographics (workers’ region of birth, education, gender and tenure) and employer characteristics (firm size and collective bargaining). To our knowledge, the role played by these different moderating variables has been either little or not explored in this context before.

Disciplines :

Special economic topics (health, labor, transportation...)

Author, co-author :

Jacobs, V. ; SBS-EM (CEBRIG and DULBEA) and Université de Mons (Soci&ter), Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium ; Université de Mons (Soci&ter), Mons, Belgium

Rycx, F. ; SBS-EM (CEBRIG and DULBEA), GLO, Soci&ter, IRES and IZA, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

Volral, Mélanie ; Université de Mons - UMONS

Language :

English

Title :

Wage Effects of Educational Mismatch According to Workers’ Origin: The Role of Demographics and Firm Characteristics

Publication date :

November 2022

Journal title :

Economist (De)

ISSN :

0013-063X

eISSN :

1572-9982

Publisher :

Springer

Volume :

170

Issue :

Pages :

459 - 501

Peer reviewed :

Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi

Additional URL :

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10645-022-09413-9.pdf

Research unit :

W718 - Economie

Research institute :

Soci&Ter

Funders :

BELSPO

Funding text :

We would like to thank the Editor (Arthur van Soest) and two anonymous referees for their useful suggestions on an earlier version of this paper. We are also most grateful to Statistics Belgium for giving access to the data. Financial support from the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO, IMMILAB project) is also kindly acknowledged.

Available on ORBi UMONS :

since 13 January 2023

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