The Impact of Employing Mismatched Workers on Firm Productivity, Wages and Profits

Daniel Halvarsson () and Patrik Tingvall ()
Additional contact information
Daniel Halvarsson: The Ratio Institute, Postal: The Ratio Institute, P.O. Box 5095, SE-102 42 Stockholm, Sweden, http://ratio.se/medarbetare/daniel-halvarsson/
Patrik Tingvall: The Ratio Institute, Postal: The Ratio Institute, P.O. Box 5095, SE-102 42 Stockholm, Sweden, http://ratio.se/medarbetare/patrik-gustavsson-tingvall/

No 291, Ratio Working Papers from The Ratio Institute

Abstract: Educational mismatch in the form of over- and under-educated workers has long been studied in relation to labor market outcomes for individual workers. While its consequences for individual workers and society are dire, we have only anecdotal evidence of its consequences for firms' competitiveness. To bridge this gap, this paper studies the impact of mismatch on firm productivity, wages and profit. The results suggest an asymmetric effect from employing over- and under-educated workers. We find that while employing over-educated workers add to wage cost, there are no matching productivity gains, By contrast, the performance of under-educated workers more than compensates for their wage costs, leading to increased profits at the firm level. The net effect, therefore, in the form of gross operating surplus is significantly negative (positive) when firms employ over- (under-)educated workers. The results suggest that the positive effects primarily stem from under-educated young workers, whereas the losses can be traced to over-educated older workers.

Keywords: Educational; mismatch; ·; Productivity; ·; Labor; cost; ·; Profits; ·; Proxy; variable (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 L25 L60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2017-09-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-eff, nep-hrm and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://ratio.se/app/uploads/2017/09/dh_pt_impact_o ... ges_products_291.pdf Full text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://ratio.se/app/uploads/2017/09/dh_pt_impact_of_employing_mismatched_workers_on_firm_productivity_wages_products_291.pdf [308 Permanent Redirect]--> https://ratio.se/app/uploads/2017/09/dh_pt_impact_of_employing_mismatched_workers_on_firm_productivity_wages_products_291.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:ratioi:0291

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Ratio Working Papers from The Ratio Institute The Ratio Institute, P.O. Box 5095, SE-102 42 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Martin Korpi ().