Overeducation and undereducation: Evidence for Portugal

Students’ expectations of the economic returns to college education: results of a controlled experiment

“…returns to schooling in Portugal are Kiker and Santos (1991), Kiker et al (1997), and Hartog et al (2001 Looking at the perceived average market returns to college education by firstyear students we see that male students overestimate the actual returns by 3.11…”

“…Consistent with Betts (1996)'s findings, senior students possess more realistic information concerning the average market returns to education than first-year students, irrespective of gender. Comparing 10 Years covered are 1985 in the study by Kiker and Santos (1991); 1991 in the study by Kiker et al (1997Kiker et al ( ), and 1982Kiker et al ( , 1986Kiker et al ( , 1992 in the study by Hartog et al (2001). 11 We caution that this evaluation provides mostly intuitive results since these figures are possibly biased estimates of the "true" marginal rates of return to college education namely because they apply only to the private sector of the Portuguese economy, public employment being excluded from the Quadros de Pessoal database.…”

Does the choice of reference levels of education matter in the ORU earnings equation?

“…Only two of the many studies documented had direct comparison of the performance of the measures of usual or required education. Santos (1995) used both RM and JA methods in a study for Portugal (See also Kiker, Santos and de Oliveira (1997).). Rumberger (1987) used the WSA and JA methods in a study for the US.…”

Overeducation in the graduate labour market: A quantile regression approach

“…To date, the majority of the literature can be characterised as attempting to provide a range of explanations for overeducation that are broadly consistent with a number of theoretical labour market frameworks. The majority of studies have tended to support an assignment interpretation of the labour market whereby the earnings of workers will depend to some extent on both individual and job characteristics implying differential returns to required, surplus and deficit education (Bauer, 2002, Daly, Buchel & Duncan, 2000, Kohn & NG, 2000, Kiker, Santos & de Oliveiria, 1997. Clearly such findings create difficulties for Human Capital Theory (HCT) which predicts equal returns.…”