experience is extremely important in reducing the probability of becoming overeducated. Furthermore, once having taken account of labor market experience, we find that years spent in the country not necessarily on the labor market (as measured by a years-since-migration variable) actually increase the probability of being overeducated. Combined, these results can be interpreted as meaning that it is concrete years spent in the labor market that determine your chances of an appropriate job-to-education match, not general assimilation accumulated by “just being here”.

Our final question concerned the wage consequences of overeducation. For this purpose we estimated a series of random effects wage regressions. Our study finds that years of overeducation do increase wages for native Danes and for immigrants with Danish educations, but much less so than years of adequate education. In particular, the penalty for overeducation is much larger for immigrants (particularly for those with foreign credentials) than for native Danes. These results are in accordance with our expectations, i.e. that an overeducated worker earns more than an adequately matched worker in the same type of job, but less than he could earn if he secured a job that matched his level of schooling.

The validity of these results is of course limited by the precision with which we can measure overeducation and the degree of reliability we can attach to the information we have on foreignacquired education. In any case, it must be stressed that workers are very heterogeneous with regard not only to observable qualifications, but most certainly also with regard to unobservable skills, abilities, etc. Moreover, jobs within a specific occupational category are also heterogeneous in terms of which qualifications are required to perform them. Therefore, with the data available for this study it is difficult to say how much of our measured overeducation is more apparent than real and whether overeducation among immigrants is in fact even more common than our results indicate. For this we would have to supplement our register-based data with survey-based information on specific job-related skills (e.g. entrepreneurial, teamwork, management and leadership skills), quality of the attained degree (through e.g. grades), predegree measures of ability, etc. as well as information on how these qualifications and skills are used in each person’s job. In particular, we lack more concrete information about how foreign qualifications are being assessed and used in the Danish labor market. How many immigrants with foreign qualifications have sought to have them assessed through official channels and what were the outcomes? How do Danish employers view individuals with foreign-acquired qualifications – officially assessed or not? Research from Australia shows that official assessments of foreign qualifications can potentially reduce the risk of overeducation for some immigrant groups (Green et al. 2005). Indeed, these are interesting topics for future research on immigrant overeducation in Denmark pending data availability.

These caveats notwithstanding, our results lead us to draw up three policy recommendations. First of all, it is important to strengthen the focus on recognizing foreign qualifications. All immigrants with a foreign-acquired education and labor market experience ought to have their qualifications assessed through e.g. CIRIUS, an authority within the Danish Ministry of Education, which undertakes such tasks. It is conceivable that an official evaluation of an immigrant’s skills and qualifications would help him find a job that matches his “true” qualifications and skills. Second, an official assessment may not be enough for some groups of immigrants. Our results show that years-since-migration significantly increases the risk of being 28