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ABSTRACT
Occupational mismatch is a widespread phenomenon among immigrants in many European countries. Mismatch is predominantly measured in terms of formal education ignoring the imperfect comparability of international educational degrees. Exploiting internationally comparable cognitive skill measures from the PIAAC data, we examine whether overeducation implies only an apparent phenomenon or a genuine overqualification observed also in the form of cognitive overskilling. Our results for 11 European countries show significant differences in the incidence of formal overeducation and genuine overqualification between immigrants and natives.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 For a detailed review of migration policies in Europe, see Kahanec and Zimmermann (Citation2011) and 2015 Annual Report of the Expert Council of German Foundations on Integration and Migration (Expert Council of German Foundations on Integration and Migration Citation2015).
2 Throughout this paper, we sometimes use shortly overeducation instead of formal overeducation and overskilling instead of cognitive overskilling. It should, however, be kept in mind that in our definition overeducation only refers to excess formal education and overskilling refers to excess cognitive skills. The terms overqualification and genuine overqualification are also used interchangeably.
3 Australia, Austria, Belgium (Flanders), Canada, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russian Federation, Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom (England and Northern Ireland), and the United States.
4 An exception in terms of sample size is Canada with around 26,000 observations.
5 Individuals without computer skills take a paper-and-pencil test. Some countries apply the test in multiple languages which are widely spoken within the country.
6 For a detailed description of obtaining the skill measures, see OECD (Citation2013). The data provide ten plausible values for the cognitive skill scores. We use the first plausible value reported as suggested by Allen, Levels, and van der Velden (Citation2013) and Hanushek et al. (Citation2015). Reapplying the analyses using other plausible values/the mean of ten plausible values does not change our results.
7 Japan, Korea, Poland, Slovak Republic.
8 Austria, Canada, Estonia and Finland due to occupational information and the US due to region of birth information.
9 We further excluded Cyprus and Czech Republic as they differ from the other countries in our sample with respect to their migration history. We additionally exclude Russian Federation as the data are claimed to be preliminary. Due to coarsened information on many variables in the public-use-file of Germany, we use the scientific-use-file obtained from GESIS and merge it to public-use-files of the other countries.
10 A three-digit ISCO classification is available for a subset of countries and it leads to very small cell sizes when estimating the mean education separately in each country. Estimation results using the three-digit ISCO classification in the pooled sample are in line with the results using the two-digit ISCO classification in each country. Results are available on request.
11 Problem-solving in technology-rich environment domains is not applied in all countries. Therefore, we exclude this test from our analysis.
12 Therefore, our estimation of the native-immigrant difference in the probability of being overskilled is likely to be an underestimation of the true difference.
13 The shares of overeducated and overskilled individuals in each country are presented in Table A12 in Appendix.
14 See Table A1 in Appendix for the definition of control variables and Table A2 for the descriptive statistics.
15 We use four ISCO skill level categories mapped to 1-digit ISCO occupational classification (See Table A10 for the definition of skill categories).
16 Immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean are not significantly different from natives only in literacy overqualification.