Overeducation among Graduates - an Overlooked Facet of the Gender Pay Gap?: Evidence from East and West Germany

Christina Boll and Julian Leppin

No 627, SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

Abstract: Germany's occupational and sectoral change towards a knowledge-based economy calls for high returns to education. Nevertheless, female graduates are paid much less than their male counterparts. We wonder whether overeducation affects sexes differently and whether this might answer for part of the gender pay gap. We decompose total year of schooling in years of over- (O), required (R), and undereducation (U). As ORU earnings estimations based on German SOEP cross-section and panel data indicate, overeducation pays off less than required education in the current job even when unobserved heterogeneity is taken into account. Moreover, analyses of job satisfaction and self-assessed overeducation point to some real mismatch. However, overeducation does not matter for the gender pay gap. By contrast, women's fewer years of required education reasonably do, answering for 7.61 pp. of the East German (18.79 %) and 2.22 pp. of the West German (32.98 %) approximate gap. Moreover, job biography and the household context affect the gap more seriously in the old Bundesländer than in the new ones. Overall, the West German pay gap almost doubles the East German one, and different endowments answer for roughly three quarters of the approximate gap in the Western but only for two thirds in the Eastern part. We conclude that the gendered earnings gap among German graduates is rather shaped by an employment behaviour suiting traditional gender roles and assigned gender stereotypes than being subject to gendered educational inadequacy.

JEL-codes: J16 J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 p.
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-ltv
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.438537.de/diw_sp0627.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Overeducation among graduates: An overlooked facet of the gender pay gap? Evidence from East and West Germany (2014)
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:diw:diwsop:diw_sp627

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().