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

Kailing Shen and Peter Kuhn

No 6848, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

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 when pitted against less-educated technical school graduates.

Keywords: internet; job search; overqualification; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2012-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ict and nep-ltv
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published - published in: Corrado Giulietti, Konstantinos Tatsiramos and Klaus F. Zimmermann (eds.), Research in Labor Economics, vol 37, Labor Market Issues in China, Emerald, 2013

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