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Do Chinese Employers Avoid Hiring Overqualified Workers? Evidence from an Internet Job Board
Kailing Shen, Peter Kuhn
Research in Labor Economics
2178 20131014 (published) Views:24477
Can having more education than a job requires reduce one’s chances of being offered the job?  We study this question in a sample of applications to jobs that are posted on an urban Chinese website.  We find that being overqualified in this way does not reduce the success rates of university-educated jobseekers applying to college-level jobs, but that it does hurt college-educated workers’ chances when applying to jobs requiring technical school, which involves three fewer years of education than college. Our results highlight a difficult situation faced by the recent large cohort of college-educated Chinese workers:  They seem to fare poorly in the competition for jobs, both when pitted against more-educated university graduates, and when pitted against less-educated technical school graduates.
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