Assessing the Incidence and Wage Effects of Overskilling in the Australian Labour Market

This paper examines the incidence and wage effects of overskilling in Australia. It finds that approximately 30 per cent of employees believed themselves to be moderately overskilled and 11 per cent believed themselves to be severely overskilled. The incidence of skills mismatch varied little when the sample was split by education. After controlling for individual and job characteristics as well as the potential bias arising from individual unobserved heterogeneity, severely overskilled workers suffer an average wage penalty of 10.2 per cent with the penalty ranging from about 6 per cent among vocationally qualified employees to just less than 20 per cent for graduates.