Retorno Salarial do Overeducation: Viés de Seleção ou Penalização ao Excesso de Escolaridade?

Abstract This paper investigates the wage effects of overeducation, a situation where workers perform jobs with lower required education. For this, data from graduates of the Federal University of Paraíba from 2003 to 2013 were used. The estimation of an OLS with fixed effects of individuals and firms, plus their interactions with time as a way to capture time varying unobserved factors, showed that overeducated graduates earn on average a lower salary than their peers with good match between education and occupation. Quantile regression showed that this effect penalizes more severely individuals in the higher quantiles of wage distribution, weakening the hypothesis that links overeducation to lower skill levels.