Is the overeducation more productive among women or men? Evidence from Italian linked employer-employee panel data

Given the growing number of graduates all over the world, the phenomenon of over-qualification has gained more and more interest since the 1980s. The increasing availability of highly educated workers, indeed, if not followed by an increase in the number of skilled jobs leads to the so-called over-qualification. For decades, the literature has focused on the negative consequences of the phenomenon at the individual and societal level. Recently, however, authors such as Rycx and Kampelmann (2012) tried to show the positive effects of over-qualification on firms’ productivity. The study here aims to investigate the role of educational mismatch on corporate performances, with particular attention to the role of workers' gender. The focus on gender is due to the fact that the economic literature has not yet reached a clear conclusion on the differences in productivity between men and women. Furthermore, women are still extremely disadvantaged in the labour market and these inequalities can have a significant impact on both their productivity and their likelihood of being over-qualified. If the research lead to the discovery that over-qualified women are more productive than over-educated men, we will find an explanation for the persistence of the gender gap in the labour market. Employers, indeed, would find optimal to hire highly educated women in low qualified positions. Furthermore, this would be a completely new result in the economic literature. The thesis uses data from an Italian region, Piedmont, as Italy is one of the European countries with a higher rate of over-qualification as well as gender gap. This country is therefore the ideal candidate to carry out this type of analysis that wants to shed some light on the relationship between educational mismatch, gender and firms’ productivity.