Educational mismatch and unemployment scarring
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate educational mismatch and its interrelationships with unemployment duration.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors study unemployment histories of Italian workers using dependent competing risk models. The authors evaluate the impact of overeducation on wage using propensity score and treatment models.
Findings
The authors show that overeducated have longer unemployment spells than their well-matched peers. This evidence implies that when assessing the impact of overeducation on wages, the duration of joblessness should be taken into account to evaluate possible additional unemployment scarring effects. The authors show that when controlling for unemployment spell duration the wage effect of overeducation significantly increases of about 7 percent. This result is supported by improvements in the sensitivity analysis.
Originality/value
The findings are consistent with an interpretation of educational mismatch as a penalizing phenomenon in the individuals’ working life associated with long-term unemployment.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
JEL Classification – J24, J64, I23
The authors would like to thank an anonymous referee for important suggestions and comments. The authors also thank participants at the European Association of Labour Economists (EALE) annual meeting 2011 (Cyprus) and at the European Economic Association (EEA) annual meeting 2012 (Malaga) for very useful suggestions and comments.
Citation
Ordine, P. and Rose, G. (2015), "Educational mismatch and unemployment scarring", International Journal of Manpower, Vol. 36 No. 5, pp. 733-753. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJM-03-2013-0048
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2015, Emerald Group Publishing Limited