Educational Attainment and Educational Mismatch in the First Employment in Spain

This paper analyses the labour market entry of Spanish school leavers and the match between education and work at the early stages of working life, using a specific data set drawn from the Spanish Module Education to Labour Market Transitions (2000). Special attention is paid to university graduates, because Spain experienced a strong growth in the demand for higher education during the last decades of the 20th century. The empirical evidence shows that although over-education is a common phenomenon in the Spanish youth labour market, being a graduate seems to be associated with a lower likelihood of over-education in the first job. Our results indicate that over-education affects more women than men and foreigners than Spaniards.