Search

This paper is among the firsts to investigate the impact of overeducation and overskilling on workers' wages using a unique pan-European database covering twenty-eight countries for the year 2014, namely the CEDEFOP's European Skills and Jobs (ESJ) survey. Overall, the results suggest a wage penalty associated with overeducation. When interacting educational mismatch with skills mismatch into apparent overeducation and genuine overeducation, the results suggest that the highest wage penalty is reached for workers that are both overeducated and overskilled.

As immigrants born in developing countries and their descendants represent a growing share of the working-age population in the developed world, their labour market integration constitutes a key factor for fostering economic development and social cohesion. Using a granular, matched employer-employee database of 1.3 million observations between 1999 and 2016, our weighted multilevel log-linear regressions first indicate that in Belgium, the overall wage gap between workers born in developed countries and workers originating from developing countries remains substantial: it reaches 15.7% and 13.5% for first- and second-generation immigrants, respectively. However, controlling for a wide range of observables (e.g. age, tenure, education, type of contract, occupation, firm-level collective agreement, firm fixed effects), we find that, whereas first-generation immigrants born in developing countries still experience a sizeable adjusted wage gap (2.7%), there is no evidence of an adjusted wage gap for their second-generation peers. Moreover, our reweighted, recentered influence function Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions agree with these findings. Indeed, while the overall wage gap for first-generation immigrants born in developing countries is driven by unfavourable human capital, low-paying occupational/sectoral characteristics, and a wage structure effect (e.g. wage discrimination), the wage gap for their second-generation peers is essentially explained by the fact that they are younger and have less tenure than workers born in developed countries. Furthermore, our results emphasize the significant moderating role of geographical origin, gender, and position in the wage distribution.

We provide first evidence of the impact of over-education, among natives and immigrants, on firm-level productivity and wages. We use Belgian linked panel data and rely on the methodology from Hellerstein et al. (1999) to estimate ORU (over-, required, and under-education) equations aggregated at the firm level. Our results show that the over-education wage premium is higher for natives than for immigrants. However, since the differential in productivity gains associated with over-education between natives and immigrants outweighs the corresponding wage premium differential, we conclude - based on OLS and dynamic GMM-SYS estimates - that over-educated native workers are in fact underpaid to a greater extent than their over-educated immigrant counterparts. This conclusion is refined by sensitivity analyses, when testing the role of immigrants' background (e.g. region of birth, immigrant generation, age at arrival in the host country, tenure).

This paper investigates the potentially non-linear relation between households' indebtedness and their consumption between 2010 and 2014 in Belgium. To do so, we use panel data from the two waves of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey. Unlike previous studies, we find a negative effect of households' indebtedness on their consumption, even in the absence of any negative shock on their assets. Our findings suggest that, without such a shock, it is the day-to-day sustainability of the debt, rather than its overall sustainability, that leads households to reduce their consumption. To explore potential non-linearities in this effect, we perform a threshold analysis, whose results suggest that households should not have a debt-service-to-income ratio greater than 30% as this leads to a substantial reduction of their consumption. The effect appears to be robust to various specifications, including the inclusion of other European countries, to result from a trade-off between housing and consumption, and to be more prevalent among more fragile households., info:eu-repo/semantics/published