Article in Skill Mismatch in Labor Markets, Research in Labor Economics, Volume 45, Emerald Publishing Limited, 2017, pp. 305 – 343.
Rolf van der Velden and Dieter Verhaest
Abstract
The explicit assumption in most literature on educational and skill mismatches is that these mismatches are inherently costly for workers. However, the results in the literature on the effects of underqualification or underskilling on wages and job satisfaction only partly support this hypothesis. Rather than assuming that both skill surpluses and skill defi-cits are inherently costly for workers, we interpret these mixed findings by taking a learning perspective on skill mismatches. Following the theory of Vygotski on the so-called “zone of proximal development,”