Inès Touré

When Education Misses the Job: Wage Penalties, Mobility, and Early Career Inequality

Abstract :

Educational mismatch is widespread among young higher education graduates, yet its wage consequences and the role of geographic mobility remain imperfectly understood. This paper examines how surplus and deficit education affect early career wages and whether spatial mobility mitigates mismatch penalties. Using panel data from the Céreq Génération 2017 survey (2017–2023), we estimate wage equations within the Over–Required–Under (ORU) education framework, accounting for unobserved individual heterogeneity through random effects. Selection into employment is addressed using two-step Heckman selection models with inverse Mills ratios derived from random-effects probit specifications. We further assess heterogeneity using unconditional quantile regressions based on Recentered Influence Functions. Our results show that required education yields substantially higher returns than surplus education, while undereducation is associated with sizable wage penalties. Geographic mobility attenuates undereducation penalties but has no effect on returns to required or surplus education. Distributional analyses reveal that overeducation premiums increase with wages, whereas undereducation penalties persist across the entire wage distribution. Overall, mobility only partially compensates for educational mismatch, highlighting the persistent role of formal credentials in shaping early career wage inequality.

Agenda > Tous les événements