At the Right Place, at the Right Time. Who Can Avoid Education-Occupation Mismatch? a Comparative Analysis.

Education – occupation mismatch is typically present at the labor market in the modern societies. Educational investments and occupational outcomes do not correspond; the school system is unable to provide the right skills, employers require; both over- and under-education is present. From the perspective of the job holders, under-employment (over-education) is the real problem which may hurt economic rationality as well as individual justice if proper returns to educational investments fail.

The paper investigates the match between education (in terms of ISCED categories) and job (in terms ISCO main groups) from a comparative perspective. For this purpose, European Social Survey data are used; seven rounds between 2002 and 2014 are merged together for 16 countries, which participated in all rounds (total N is around 200,000). The match is operationalized by the degree how education and job correspond, e.g. jobs with ISCO main category 3-9 are considered as under-employment for respondents with tertiary education. Since the linkage between the school system and the labor market varies in the different countries, the countries are grouped to five regimes based on the character of this relationship: Flexcurity: DK, FI, NO, SE, NL; Corporative: BE, CH, DE (West), FR; Liberal: UK, IE; Mediterranean: ES, PT; Post-communist: DE (East), HU, PL, SI.

In addition to the concrete job title, further features of employment are also considered, like type of contract, full- vs. part-time work, degree of autonomy, etc. in order to determine the degree of precariousness in the occupation. Probability of precarious employment is investigated in the light of the level of schooling.

The whole analysis put large emphasis on the variation by gender, age and ethnicity. The education – occupation mismatch is studied for men and women separately, by distinguishing age cohorts and majority and minority groups in terms of ethnicity.