Overeducation, undereducation, and the theory of career mobility

Felix Buchel and Antje Mertens

Applied Economics, 2004, vol. 36, issue 8, 803-816

Abstract: The theory of career mobility (Sicherman and Galor, Journal of Political Economy, 98(1), 169-92, 1990) claims that wage penalties for overeducated workers are compensated by better promotion prospects. Sicherman (Journal of Labour Economics, 9(2), 101-22, 1991) was able to confirm this theory in an empirical study using panel data. However, the only retest using panel data so far (Robst, Eastern Economic Journal, 21, 539-50, 1995) produced rather ambiguous results. In the present paper, random effects models to analyse relative wage growth are estimated using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. It is found that overeducated workers in Germany have markedly lower relative wage growth rates than adequately educated workers. The results cast serious doubt on whether the career mobility model is able to explain overeducation in Germany. The plausibility of the results is supported by the finding that overeducated workers have less access to formal and informal on-the-job training, which is usually found to be positively correlated with wage growth even when controlling for selectivity effects (Pischke, Journal of Population Economics, 14, 523-48, 2001).

Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (57)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0003684042000229532 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:applec:v:36:y:2004:i:8:p:803-816

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEC20

DOI: 10.1080/0003684042000229532

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().