Young Workers’ Overeducation and Cohort Effects in “P.I.G.S.” Countries versus the Netherlands: a Pseudo-Panel Analysis

According to theoretical and empirical evidence young workers are more likely to be overeducated than adult ones, especially in countries where the educational attainments of young people grow quickly and the school-to-work transition is difficult and/or lengthy. Nonetheless, if overeducation were expected to disappear during working life, it would not be a crucial problem. To test the transitory nature/persistence of this phenomenon, firstly, I estimated overeducation using the competences frontier method and, later, I studied the “destination” of different cohorts of workers by applying a pseudo-panel technique to Eurostat data referring to European Mediterranean countries and the Netherlands.