This essay investigates the potential educational mismatch of immigrants compared to natives concerning the Swedish labor market. The data is collected from the European Social Survey between 2002-2014. Our results show that immigrants tend to be more overeducated than natives. Our results also indicate that more recent cohorts are more likely to be overeducated compared to cohorts that have lived for a longer time period in Sweden. Disparities in language and country specific skills but also if a person belong to an ethnic minority are reasons for why these mismatches occur.

This thesis aims to investigate the extent to which work-related factors contribute to the health inequalities often observed between foreign-origin and native-origin persons in Sweden. Four empirical studies using survey data and population-based registers assessed the health impact of different labor market adversities among groups of foreign-origin persons who were both in and outside the labor market relative to native-origin Swedes. Studies I and II examined associations between different measures of working life quality, including adverse psychosocial and physical working conditions and educational mismatch, and self-reported health among the employed. Adverse psychosocial and physical working conditions minimally contributed to the excess risk of poor health found among workers from low- and middle-income countries. Over-education had a stronger association with increased risk of poor health, most notably among foreign-born workers from countries outside of Western Europe. Under-educated women from these countries also demonstrated an elevated risk of poor health.  There was no association between educational mismatch and poor health among native-born workers.  Studies III and IV focused on the health implications of labor market exclusion, and examined relationships between employment status and risk of all-cause mortality and suicide. The majority of foreign-origin groups that experienced unemployment showed an elevated risk of both mortality and suicide. The magnitude of excess risk varied by generational status and region of origin. Variations in patterns of suicide risk were also evident among migrants by age at arrival and duration of residence. Yet within many foreign-origin groups, health advantages were observed among the employed. The health of migrants is affected by the confluence of several different pre- and post-migration factors.  The extent to which health inequalities are found among persons of foreign-origin in Sweden is influenced by the degree to which they experience labor market adversities, as well as differential vulnerability to the negative effects of these adversities across foreign-origin groups. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 3: Manuscript. Paper 4: Manuscript.</p>

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Labour economists in South Africa have extensively researched on almost all aspects of the unemployment phenomenon, specifically, the levels and extent of unemployment as well as the causes of unemployment have received a lot of empirical attention. One category of the labour force, namely the underemployed, has mostly been ignored in empirical studies. An investigation into the prevalence and rate of underemployment is essential because unemployment alone underestimates the magnitude of a country’s available excess labour capacity. The study focuses on various conceptual and empirical issues, including the definition of underemployment, the extent of underemployment in South Africa, demographic characteristics of the underemployed, an empirical estimation of the total earnings effect of underemployment, the duration of underemployment, and the possible policy options to tackle underemployment. To achieve its research objectives, the study conducts various descriptive and econometric analyses, using the data from the 1995-2016 labour force surveys and the first four waves of NIDS conducted in 2008-2015.

Workers whose credentials and skills do not meet or exceed the required competencies for their jobs have been of interest to scholars investigating the transition from school to jobs. To understand how such mismatch arises in the transitional period, some scholars emphasize that the labor market cannot keep up with the pace of educational expansion. Thus, many highly educated workers do not find jobs that fit their schooling and skill level. Others locate the source of mismatch in the inability of education to produce enough workers with the desired skill levels in the labor market. By focusing on this mismatch, this dissertation aims to provide a better understanding of the relationship between education and work. In particular, this study examines data covering the past two decades to see how the number of workers with skill and educational mismatch has changed and how educational expansion and transformations in the labor market have contributed to the change. The results indicate that workers with such mismatch have generally increased over the past two decades, but educational expansion has minimally contributed to this change. Rather, it is more likely caused by business cycles or job characteristics. The study also explores how the practices applied to select suitable workers in the hiring process affects workers’ job matching. This study suggests that workers are classified into various types depending on strategies by which employers use to determine workers’ degree of fit. Subsequently, their earnings and job satisfaction vary according to workers’ membership in these types of groups.

Given the clear development of the educational mismatch phenomenon in our advanced economies, it seems interesting to investigate the effects of such phenomenon on the labour market. Based on available databases, this thesis gets into the research area of new working organizations and their effects on firm performance in a broader sense, by relying on a double stance. From the firm’s point of view, it analyses how educational mismatch impacts firm productivity (Chapter 2) and profitability (Chapter 3), according to different working environments. Chapter 2 provides first evidence on whether the direct relationship between educational mismatch and firm productivity varies across working environments, materialized as a socially responsible environment and a challenging environment. The results show that corporate social responsibility creates a working environment that fosters the positive impact of over-education on productivity, suggesting that socially responsible firms are more able than others to take advantage of the surplus knowledge of their over-educated workers. When investigating the role of a challenging environment, our results show that over-educated workers are more productive in firms that (i) require higher skills, (ii) rely on high-technological/knowledge processes, and (iii) operate in a more uncertain economic context, these three environments materializing a challenging situation. Chapter 3 reveals a profit-ability profile in the form of an inverted L with, at firm level, under-education being associated with a negative impact on profits, whereas higher levels of normal and over-education are associated with positive returns for firms. It also underlines caveats of relying on human capital hypothesis since increasing educational norms is associated with productivity gains that outpace hikes in labour costs, with the returns, in the case of Belgium, being captures by firms in the form of higher profits. Finally, it shows that in the particular context of high-tech industries, over-education could be a profitable strategy because hiring above educational norms leads to higher levels of profitability.From the workers’ point of view, this thesis analyses the wages impacts of educational mismatch by deepening and expanding the educational mismatch phenomenon to the skills mismatch phenomenon. Chapter 4 investigates the impact of educational and skills mismatches on workers’ wages by relying on three mismatch situations: (i) the apparent matching, where a worker is found to be properly educated but over-skilled; (ii) the apparent over-education, where a worker is found to be over-educated but properly skilled; and (iii) the genuine over-education, where a worker is found to be over-educated and over-skilled. Beside these considerations, this chapter also analyses whether the origin of the worker may influence the wage response to educational and skills mismatches. The results show that all specifications of over-education and over-skilling impact wages negatively, with the highest penalties for genuine over-education. When investigating differences between native and immigrant workers, the results suggest that immigrants suffer from a slightly higher pay penalty than natives. European immigrant and native workers thus do not seem to be that differently impacted by mismatches in terms of education and/or skills. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This doctoral thesis addresses one of the most significant topics in contemporary research in international migration; that is the education-occupation mismatch of highly qualified foreign workers in the labour market of a host country. The thesis focuses on the situation in the Czech labour market in the time-period between 2009 and 2016. By the possibility to utilize a unique set of non-public, anonymized individual data on foreign employment this thesis provides a first thorough empirical evidence on the level of mismatch of skilled migrant workers in the Czech labour market, with a dominant focus on quantitative approach to the given issue. Results of the research reveal that the mismatch between the migrant employees' attained (tertiary) and required education at their job occupations on the Czech labour market does exist and it is encountered by 20-30 % of tertiary educated foreign workers; moreover, level of mismatch has been gradually increasing over the given time-period. The differences in the level of mismatch then fundamentally differ across particular citizenship groups. The resulting level of mismatch of highly skilled foreign workers in the Czech labour market seems to be driven predominantly by broader social and economic drivers. More specifically, these are particularly a limited...