This paper surveys the economics literature on overeducation. The original motivation to study this topic were reports that the strong increase in the number of college graduates in the early 1970s in the US led to a decrease in the returns to college education. We argue that Duncan and...

This paper presents new evidence that increases in college enrollment lead to a decline in the average quality of college graduates between 1960 and 2000, resulting in a decrease of 6 percentage points in the college premium. We show that although a standard demand and supply framework can...

The interpretation of graduate mismatch manifested either as overeducation or as overskilling remains problematical. This paper uses annual panel information on both educational and skills mismatches uniquely found in the HILDA survey to analyse the relationship of both mismatches with pay, job...

Recent research into the Australian labour market has reported that a substantial proportion of the tertiary-educated labour force is under-utilised relative to their level of education, echoing findings from an expanding international literature. This paper uses recent panel data from the 2010...

In economies characterized by low labor demand and high rates of youth unemployment, entrepreneurship training has the potential to enable youth to gain skills and create their own jobs. This paper presents experimental evidence on a new entrepreneurship track that provides business training and...

Our goal in this paper is to focus on highly educated men and women and try to explore the trade‐offs between family and working career in Spain, where changes in female behavior with respect to the labor market have been relatively recent but rather important. We compare male and female...

I use the 1993 and 2003 National Surveys of College Graduates to examine the higher exit rate of women compared to men from science and engineering relative to other fields. I find that the higher relative exit rate is driven by engineering rather than science, and show that 60% of the gap can...

Can having more education than a job requires reduce one's chances of being offered the job? We study this question in a sample of applications to jobs that are posted on an urban Chinese website. We find that being overqualified in this way does not reduce the success rates of...

We show that cyclical skill mismatch, defined as mismatch between the skills supplied by college graduates and skills demanded by hiring industries, is an important mechanism behind persistent career loss from graduating in recessions. Using Norwegian data, we find a strong countercyclical...

This paper analyzes the role of connections in academic promotions. We exploit evidence from centralized evaluations in Spain, where evaluators are randomly assigned to promotion committees. We find that prior connections between candidates and evaluators have a dramatic impact on candidates'...