%0 Journal Article
%T Educational Attainment and Educational Mismatch in the First Employment in Spain
%A Marta Rahona-L¨®pez
%A Carmen P¨¦rez-Esparrells
%J ISRN Education
%D 2013
%R 10.1155/2013/850827
%X This paper analyses the labour market entry of Spanish school leavers and the match between education and work at the early stages of working life, using a specific data set drawn from the Spanish Module Education to Labour Market Transitions (2000). Special attention is paid to university graduates, because Spain experienced a strong growth in the demand for higher education during the last decades of the 20th century. The empirical evidence shows that although over-education is a common phenomenon in the Spanish youth labour market, being a graduate seems to be associated with a lower likelihood of over-education in the first job. Our results indicate that over-education affects more women than men and foreigners than Spaniards. 1. Introduction The seminal empirical works focusing on the study of educational mismatch date back to the early 1970s, when this problem and its consequences were detected for the first time in Canada [1] and in the United States [2]. Since then, several researchers have analysed the scale and the impact of educational mismatch in different developed countries. The results of these studies show that a percentage of the employed population presents a mismatch between their educational attainment and the level of studies required in their job [3¨C5]). Two types of educational mismatch have been identified: overeducation, which occurs if a worker has excess education to do his/her work, and undereducation, which results in workers not having enough education to do their job. Although the literature on mismatch in the labour market is quite extensive, studies focusing only on young people and devoted to analysing the influence of socioeconomic variables on overeducation in the first job are not very abundant. For instance, Allen and van der Velden [6] examine the labour situation of Dutch youngsters, and they find that more than 40% of young white men are overeducated at the beginning of their working life, whereas only 13.6% of them present undereducation in their first employments. There are several papers which focus on studying the problem of overeducation among graduates in the United Kingdom. For instance, Battu et al. [7] find that more than 40% of graduates have a job which does not require a degree, one year after graduation; the results by Dolton and Vignoles [8] also show that about 38% of graduates were overeducated for their first job; Chevalier and Lindley [9] investigate the effect of the graduate expansion on early labour market attainment; their results show that about 35% of British graduates are overeducated
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn.education/2013/850827/