Educational Mismatch: Are High-skilled Immigrants Really Working in High-Skilled Jobs, and What Price Do They Pay If They Are Not?

Author(s):  
George J. Borjas ◽  
Barry R. Chiswick ◽  
George J. Borjas ◽  
Barry R. Chiswick ◽  
George J. Borjas ◽  
...  

This chapter examines the incidence of mismatch of educational attainment and occupation of employment, and the impact of this mismatch on earnings, of high-skilled adult male immigrants in the U.S. labor market. The results show that over-education is widespread in the high-skilled U.S. labor market, both for immigrants and the native born. The extent of over-education declines with duration in the U.S. as high-skilled immigrants obtain jobs commensurate with their educational level. Years of schooling beyond what is usual for a worker’s occupation are associated with very low increases in earnings. Indeed, in the first 10 to 20 years in the U.S. years of over-education among high-skilled workers affect earnings negatively. This ineffective use of surplus education appears across all occupations and high-skilled education levels. Although schooling serves as a pathway to occupational attainment, earnings appear more closely linked to a worker’s occupation than to the individual’s level of schooling.

Author(s):  
Eric W. Christensen

Abstract This study is a modification of the Kane, Spizman, and Donelson, (2013) model for educational attainment of children. The primary modification is to provide separate models for children who lived with both parents compared to those who did not to allow for differential impacts of family characteristics by household type on the children's educational attainment. The study also (1) captures five additional years of educational attainment data that were not available for the Kane, et al., (2013) study, (2) does not impose a functional form on some of the independent variables, (3) modifies the model to facilitate the inclusion of observations for which some data are missing, and (4) provides estimates for the average age at the time various degrees are obtained. The results show that the education levels of both parents are impactful for the educational attainment of children who lived with both parents and that there is no statistical difference between the impact of mother's and father's education level. In contrast, the results show the relatively greater impact of the mother's compared to the father's educational level on the educational attainment of children in households that did not include both parents.


2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 336-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franklin Amuakwa-Mensah ◽  
Louis Boakye-Yiadom ◽  
William Baah-Boateng

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of education on migration decisions focusing on rural and urban in-migrants by comparing the 2005/2006 and 2012/2013 rounds of the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS5 and GLSS6). After correcting for selectivity bias, the authors observed that anticipated welfare gain and socio-economic variables such as sector of employment, sex, experience, age, educational level and marital status significantly affect an individual’s migration decision. Design/methodology/approach – The authors made use of Sjaastad’s (1962) human capital framework as a basis for examining the impact of education on migration. The migration decision equation was based on the Heckman two stage procedure. Findings – While educational attainment is observed to have a positive effect on migration decision in the period 2005/2006, the authors find a negative effect of educational attainment on migration decision in the period 2012/2013. The effect of educational attainment on migration decision in 2005/2006 for urban in-migrant is higher than the effect for rural in-migrant, with its significance varying for the different stages of educational attainment. In absolute terms, whereas the effect of secondary educational attainment on migration decisions for urban in-migrant is higher than that of rural in-migrant, the reverse holds for higher educational attainment during the period 2012/2013. Social implications – Based on the mixed effect of education on migration decision as evident from the study, policies to enhance the educational system in Ghana should be complemented with job creations in the entire country. Moreover, special attention should be given to the rural sector in such a way that the jobs to be created in the sector do not require skilled workers. With quality education and job creation, the welfare of individuals living in urban and rural areas will be enhanced. Originality/value – In spite of the importance of education in migration decisions, there is scanty literature on the rural-urban dimension. To the best of the author’s knowledge there is no literature in the Ghanaian context which examines the rural and urban perspective of the impact of education on migration with a much recent data. Further, the author consider how the determinants of migration decision have changed over time focusing on rural and urban perspectives.


Author(s):  
Yelyzaveta Snitko ◽  
Yevheniia Zavhorodnia

The development of a modern economy, in the context of the fourth industrial revolution, is impossible without the accumulation and development of human capital, since the foundation of the transformation of the economic system in an innovative economy is human capital. In this regard, the level of development and the efficiency of using human capital are of paramount importance. This article attempts to assess the role of human capital in the fourth industrial revolution. In the future, human talent will play a much more important role in the production process than capital. However, it will also lead to a greater division of the labor market with a growing gap between low-paid and high-paid jobs, and will contribute to an increase in social tensions. Already today, there is an increase in demand for highly skilled workers, especially in high-income countries, with a decrease in demand for workers with lower skills and lower levels of education. Analysis of labor market trends suggests that the future labor market is a market where there is simultaneously a certain demand for both higher and lower skills and abilities, combined with the devastation of the middle tier. The fourth industrial revolution relies heavily on the concept of human capital and the importance of finding complementarity between human and technology. In assessing the impact of the fourth industrial revolution, the relationship between technology, economic growth and human resources was examined. The analysis was carried out in terms of three concepts of economic growth, technological change and human capital. Human capital contributes to the advancement of new technologies, which makes the concept of human capital an essential factor in technological change. The authors emphasize that the modern economy makes new demands on workers; therefore it is necessary to constantly accumulate human capital, develop it through continuous learning, which will allow the domestic economy to enter the trajectory of sustainable economic growth. The need to create conditions for a comprehensive increase in the level of human capital development is noted.


Author(s):  
Caroline Kingori ◽  
Mohammad Rifat Haider ◽  
Seleshi Ayalew Asfaw ◽  
Senya Afi Ghamli

Immigrants in the US work in diverse professions and contribute to the economy. They play an important role in the economies in which they settle by complementing the skills lacking and create a level playing field for wages in the labor market. The U.S. Midwest has seen exceptionally high growth in immigrant populations in recent decades. While employment leads to a better quality of life when workers can afford basic necessities, immigrants encounter dire health challenges due to unemployment, underemployment, extreme working conditions, long work hours, and no paid leave. There is limited research examining the connection between career development experiences with the health of immigrant workers. This chapter examines the impact that employment circumstances have on skilled immigrants' health outcomes in the Midwest.


1998 ◽  
Vol 7 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 145-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph S. Lee

Having experienced an economic crisis earlier, Taiwan was on its way to recovery when the crisis struck in 1997. In general, Taiwan's labor market was hardly affected by the crisis. Although the demand for foreign workers continues, there will be a decline in the employment of foreign workers in the future. The completion of construction projects and the upgrading of the economic structure would imply a lesser demand for foreign workers in the next few years. In the future, while the Taiwanese labor market would be more restrictive of less-skilled workers, it would be more open to professionals and highly skilled.


AERA Open ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 233285841987405
Author(s):  
Lauren Schudde ◽  
Kaitlin Bernell

Although decades of research highlight the impact of schooling on earnings, less evidence exists regarding other employment outcomes. Nonwage labor market returns to education are important in the United States, where health insurance and retirement income are typically tied to employment. Using longitudinal, nationally representative data, we examine the role of educational attainment in predicting nonwage employment outcomes and control for a host of individual and institutional measures. Even after controlling for individual and institutional characteristics, results indicate that educational attainment predicts employment and markers of “good” jobs, like access to employer-provided health and dental insurances, retirement plans, and paid leave. Furthermore, by delineating between various subbaccalaureate levels of college attainment, our results illustrate the complex variation in returns to college for those who did not complete a 4-year degree.


2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 921-958 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan A. Lanning

Abstract This article proposes a framework with which to estimate the impact on labor market outcomes implied by audit-pair study findings. I present a search model with discrimination and calibrate the model with experimental data from audit studies of the U.S. labor market and the NLSY79 to estimate the wage and unemployment implications of documented hiring disparity. All simulated results are highly consistent with the hypothesis that hiring discrimination may be an important component of the observed labor market disparity between African American and white workers in the U.S. Additionally, while the simulations only generate a small proportion of the observed gaps in unemployment, it proves to be one of the few models capable of explaining simultaneous wage in unemployment gaps. The most robust finding of the article is that non-trivial wage gaps can result even from the seemingly small differences in hiring rates documented in these studies.


2011 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-108
Author(s):  
Hoang Van Kinh ◽  
Daniel Westbrook

The degree to which the impact of schooling on real per capita household consumption expenditure (rpce) depends on the intensity of local labor market activity was estimated and changes in that relationship during a substantial part of Vietnam’s transition period (1993–2004 were documented). Key variables in the analysis are the years of schooling attained by the best-educated member of each household, an index of labor market activity at the commune level, and the interaction between the two. As schooling is likely to be endogenous, average educational attainment of others in the same age, gender, and commune cohort was used as an instrumental variable (IV). The estimated impact of educational attainment on rpce is economically substantial, statistically significant, increasing over time, and is powerfully enhanced by increasing labor market activity.


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