Mismatches in the Spanish labor market: Education vs. competence match

The accuracy of the match between a worker's talents, skills, and capabilities and those required by his or her job has seldom been addressed in the empirical literature. However, a number of analyses on the match between workers' education levels and those required by jobs have been published over the last 10 years. Obviously, the level of formal education completed by workers is more easily observed than their levels of human capital competences. Indeed, the latter would be rather difficult to observe. Nonetheless, this approximation is not straightforward, since formal education is only a mean for the acquisition of some human capital competences. We cross-examine the education match and the competence match between the supply and the demand of labor in Spain with data from 1998. Our results suggest that both types of matches do differ in their incidence, determinants, and wage consequences. © International Atlantic Economic Society 2005.