Employment polarization and over-education in Germany, Spain, Sweden and UK

Abstract

The objective of this study is twofold. First, it investigates the association between technological change and over-education by analysing incidence of overeducation and its change across skill-based and task-based job categories. Second, it compares countries with different employment change pattern-mainly upgrading and polarizing-to establish a link between employment polarization and overeducation. Using data from European Labour Force Survey covering the period from 1999 to 2007, the paper analyses four countries of Europe-Germany, Spain, Sweden and UK. The results suggest higher incidence of over-education in polarized countries-Spain and UK as compared to countries with a somewhat upgrading pattern of employment change-Germany and Sweden. It also reveals that in Spain and UK, over-education is prominent and increasing over time in the low-skill jobs which are mostly non-routine manual in nature, while Germany and Sweden have more over-educated workers in middle skilled routine and high skilled analytical jobs. I find similar results in both descriptive and job fixed effects regressions.

Low‐skill jobs and routine tasks specialization: New insights from Italian provinces

“…In sum, pooled OLS and 2SLS‐IV estimates point out that local routinization leads to an increase of the share of tertiary educated workers in low‐skill occupations and, then, favours an over‐education pattern at province level. Evidence in Table 4 is coherent with other studies showing that in countries where the polarization is pronounced (like Italy, Spain and UK), the over‐education is prominent and increasing over time in low‐skill jobs, as compare to countries with an upgrading pattern of employment change such as Germany and Sweden (Sarkar, 2017). Furthermore, results reported in Tables 3 and 4 are consistent with the interpretation according to which educational mismatch in Italy is related to a structural weaknesses of labour demand for highly qualified workers (Caroleo & Pastore, 2018; Naticchioni, Ricci, & Rustichelli, 2008).…”