Over-education among A8 migrants in the UK

Stuart Campbell ()
Additional contact information
Stuart Campbell: Department of Quantitative Social Science, Institute of Education, University of London

No 13-09, DoQSS Working Papers from Quantitative Social Science - UCL Social Research Institute, University College London

Abstract: I present new evidence on the incidence and wage associations of over-education among migrants to the UK from the ‘A8’ EU accession countries of Central and Eastern Europe from 2004-2011. Using the Labour Force Survey, I employ a novel strategy to maximise the number of migrants drawn from the dataset over the period of interest, creating a survey sample of A8 migrants of unprecedented size. I also use a new method of classifying education attained outside the UK, which takes account of different European education systems. I find that A8 migrants face a substantially higher risk of over-education in the UK than other recent EU migrants, and that this additional risk remains after taking account of observed characteristics. I argue that this result is driven by unobserved differences between the groups, arising from distinct self-selection processes associated with the institutional context of the EU accession. I also find that in non-graduate occupations, the wage penalties faced by A8 migrants in the UK are of such strength that even the over-educated are paid less than matched UK nationals. Moreover, A8 migrants are concentrated in a particular sub-group of occupations, where higher wages are not available for the over-educated.

Keywords: Immigration; educational mismatch; labour market; skill recognition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J24 J61 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-05-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lab, nep-lma and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.ucl.ac.uk/REPEc/pdf/qsswp1309.pdf (application/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:qss:dqsswp:1309

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DoQSS Working Papers from Quantitative Social Science - UCL Social Research Institute, University College London Quantitative Social Science, Social Research Institute, 55-59 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0NU. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dr Neus Bover Fonts ().