Demand and Supply of Skilled Labour and Overeducation in Europe: A Country-level Analysis

Educational expansion and the education gradient in health: A hierarchical age-period-cohort analysis

“…Nonetheless, the need for comparative research is obvious with regard to this time-related change. The general trend of slightly falling health returns on education could be counterbalanced by country-specific dynamics (Bracke et al, 2014), as European countries might substantially differ with regard to the expansion of tertiary education (Croce & Ghignoni, 2012) and occupational upgrading (Fernández-Macías & Hurley, 2008). Hence, further research could aim to explain the between-cohort variation by introducing country-and cohort-specific characteristics (e.g.…”

Determinants of regional differences in rates of overeducation in Europe

“…Our approach is slightly different as we explicitly focus on factors that directly address supply and demand imbalances or mismatches, whereas, with the exception of the youth unemployment rates at NUTS 2 level, Ghignoni et al (2014) analyse demand and supply factors separately. Croce et al (2012) and Verhaest et al (2013) also found that measures related to excess supply of skilled labour were related to the incidence of overeducation.…”

“…There is substantial variation in the incidence of overeducation between countries (Di Pietro, 2002;Bárcena-Martín et al, 2012;Croce and Ghignoni, 2012;Verhaest and Van der Velden, 2013). While there has been a surge in the literature on overeducation (see McGuinness (2006) and Sloane (2003) for reviews), the majority of existing work tends to be specific to individual countries and to focus either on measuring the wage effects or on the determinants of country-level education-job mismatch.…”

“…Verheast and van der Velden (2013), estimating a multi-level model for a sample of European graduates, found evidence of a role for structural imbalances in both the quantity of skilled workers and their composition in terms of field of study. Croce and Ghignoni (2012), in their pooled model for 26 European countries, found that the ratio of wages of graduates to those of less-qualified workers is associated with graduate overeducation and also that recession leads to overeducation, with graduates accepting jobs requiring less education than they possess. Ghignoni and Verashchagina (2014) explore determinants of individual overeducation risk in 10 European countries taking into account both supply -side and demand -side factors.…”

“…This approach to the measurement of overeducation is adopted due to the absence of alternative subjective based measures within EU-SILC, and it is similar to that adopted in previous studies (e.g. Croce et al, 2012;Ghignoni et al, 2014). Moreover, while it has been noted that this realized matches approach tends to show lower rates of overeducation than alternative measures based either on self-assessment of the job-skills match or detailed analysis of job 5 The number of available observations per region and country are displayed in table A1 in the Data Appendix.…”