Skill mismatches and wages among European university graduates

This paper uses comparable international data to examine the extent and wage effects of skill mismatches among European university graduates. The results show that the mismatched earn on average 11.7% less than their well-matched counterparts. This effect, however, cannot be regarded as constant across the conditional earnings distribution: workers with lower unobserved earnings capacity tend to be exposed to greater wage loses when they end up in mismatched jobs