Do Chinese Employers Avoid Hiring Overqualified Workers? Evidence from an Internet Job Board

Kailing Shen and Peter Kuhn ()

A chapter in Labor Market Issues in China, 2013, vol. 37, pp 1-30 from Emerald Publishing Ltd

Abstract: Can having more education than a job requires reduce one’s chances of being offered the job? We study this question in a sample of applications to jobs that are posted on an urban Chinese website. We find that being overqualified in this way does not reduce the success rates of university-educated jobseekers applying to college-level jobs, but that it does hurt college-educated workers’ chances when applying to jobs requiring technical school, which involves three fewer years of education than college. Our results highlight a difficult situation faced by the recent large cohort of college-educated Chinese workers: They seem to fare poorly in the competition for jobs, both when pitted against more-educated university graduates and less-educated technical school graduates.

Keywords: Overqualification; Internet job board; job search and match; labor demand; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/10.1108/S0147-9121(2 ... RePEc&WT.mc_id=RePEc (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
Working Paper: Do Chinese Employers Avoid Hiring Overqualified Workers? Evidence from an Internet Job Board (2012)
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:eme:rleczz:s0147-9121(2013)0000037005

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
Emerald Group Publishing, Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley, BD16 1WA, UK
http://www.emeraldgr ... ies.htm?id=0147-9121

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Research in Labor Economics from Emerald Publishing Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Charlotte Maiorana ().