education. Combined with the results for labor market experience reported above, this may be interpreted as saying that “just” living in the country is not enough to ensure an adequate job-toeducation match. It is concrete labor market experience that is needed to increase the chances of an appropriate match. It follows that years spent in Denmark outside the labor force reduce an immigrant’s chances of securing an adequate job-to-education match. This can be explained by formal human capital skills being depreciated during long periods of unemployment, although some of the time may of course be spent accumulating other labor-market relevant skills such as Danish language proficiency.

Note that the three continuous variables age, experience and YSM enter the equations as polynomials and therefore they ought to be interpreted together with their squared counterparts. Also, these three variables are closely correlated – another reason why they should be interpreted together. To provide the “full picture” we have calculated the effect of accumulating labor market experience in Denmark for immigrants with a Danish education and for immigrants with a foreign education. Our first example is a “typical” educated 40-year-old immigrant with a Danish education (with YSM = 20, a vocational or a higher education, and a probability of being overeducated = 20.3%). Accumulating 10 years of labor market experience (and taking account of the simultaneous effects of increased age and increased YSM) reduces his probability of being overeducated by 11.8 percentage points. Not accumulating any labor market experience at all over a period of 10 years, on the other hand, increases the likelihood of becoming overeducated by 6.4 percentage points. Our second example is a “typical” educated 40-year-old immigrant with a foreign education (with YSM = 10, a vocational or a higher education, and a probability of being overeducated = 29.6%). Accumulating 10 years of labor market experience (and taking account of the simultaneous effects of increased age and increased YSM) reduces his probability of being overeducated by 3.4 percentage points. Not accumulating any labor market experience at all over a period of 10 years, on the other hand, increases his likelihood of becoming overeducated by 3.9 percentage points.

These results point out that it is extremely important for both groups of immigrants to gain experience on the Danish labor market in order to reduce their risk of becoming overeducated. But both the benefits of having experience and the adverse effects of not having any experience are larger for immigrants with a Danish education. Indeed these results suggest that immigrants with a foreign education have a difficult time affecting their risk of overeducation, even through accumulation of labor market experience. These findings fit well with the results of the equation for immigrants in total, showing that having a foreign-acquired education strongly increases the risk of being overeducated (a result also found in other studies such as Battu and Sloane, 2004 and Lindley and Lenton, 2006). Foreign qualifications do not seem to be valued very highly by Danish employers. It is worth noting that the probability of being overeducated does not increase monotonically with the length of education for native Danes and for immigrants with a Danish education. First of all, there are relatively few individuals with a short higher education on which to base the estimate. But more importantly, medium-length higher educations in Denmark are typically extremely vocationally oriented and include educations such as nurse training, school teachers and kindergarten teachers – all of which are educations directly oriented towards specific occupations. This is most certainly one reason why the probability of being overeducated is lower for individuals with a medium-length higher education compared with individuals with either a short or a long higher education.

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