published in: International Migration, 2018, 56 (2), 177-200
The recent literature on overeducation has provided divergent results on whether or not overeducation bears an earnings penalty. In addition, few studies have considered overeducation among immigrants. This paper uses panel data analyses to investigate the match between education and occupation and resulting earnings effects for immigrants from English Speaking, and Non-English Speaking, Backgrounds relative to the native-born population in Australia. Based on nine years of longitudinal data, the panel approach addresses individual heterogeneity effects (motivation, ability, and compensating differentials) that are crucial in overeducation analysis. First, we find that immigrants have significantly higher incidence rates of overeducation than the native-born. This probability increases, rather than diminishes, once we control for unobserved correlated effects. Second, based on panel fixed effects analyses there is no penalty for overeducation for ESB immigrants. However, NESB immigrants receive a lower return to required and overeducation compared to the other groups after controlling for individual heterogeneity.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.