Overqualification and skills mismatches among immigrants: the impact of host language proficiency

Título: Overqualification and skills mismatches among immigrants: the impact of host language proficiency

Ponente:  Santiago Budría (Universidad Antonio de Nebrija)

Organizador: Ana Meca Martínez

Fecha: Lunes 10 de junio de 2019, 12:30 h.

Lugar: Sala de Seminarios , Instituto Universitario de Investigación CIO, Edificio Torretamarit, Universidad Miguel Hernández (Campus de Elche)

Resumen: Examining the determinants of qualification and skills mismatches has become a recurrent theme in the literature. Educational mismatches have serious consequences for individuals and can seriously hamper wages, job satisfaction and labour market prospects. These effects can be drammatical among immigrants, since they add up to an already disadvantaged position in the labour market. This paper asks to what extent host language proficiency can insure immigrants against the risk of ending up in mismatched jobs. Using the 2003-2016 waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA), the paper discriminates between three forms of mismatch, overqualification, underqualification and skills mismatch. To account for the potential endogeneity of host language proficiency, the paper adopts a 2SLS instrumental variable model. Specifically, host language proficiency is instrumented using Bleakley and Chin (Rev Econ Stat 86:481–496, 2004) strategy, which exploits the fact that younger children learn languages more easily than older ones. The results from a biprobit are also reported. We find that English language proficiency among immigrants in Australia significantly reduces the probability of ending up in mismatched jobs. The effects are sensitively higher in the case of overqualification. All in all, the result suggests that host language proficiency is a form of human capital that interacts positively with skills and abilities already possessed by the immigrant.