Less favorable outcomes—such as overeducation—early in the careers of younger workers may impact negatively on future labor market success, so it is important to understand the incidence of youth overeducation, its evolution over time, and the drivers of youth labor market mismatch. Most research has focused on examining the incidence and impacts of overeducation. This chapter represents one of the few attempts to examine patterns of overeducation within countries, while the adoption of a time-series approach enables the identification of common trends across Europe. Overeducation rates in Europe are converging upward over time, and the general pattern of overeducation is linked across many countries, suggesting that the phenomenon responds in a similar way to external shocks and, consequently, may react in similar ways to appropriate policy interventions. This chapter finds that youth overeducation is driven by the composition of education provision, aggregate labor demand, and labor market flexibility.
A comparative analysis of youth labor market exclusion