accumulated much labor market experience. Our sample is restricted to males because the employment and earnings situations for female immigrants are considerably different from those of male immigrants. The age group considered consists of individuals aged 30-57. The lower age limit is set to take account of the rather high age at which Danish students on average finish their post-secondary school education compared to students in other countries. The upper age limit is set to avoid selection problems related to early retirement. Individuals who are undertaking fulltime education and individuals for whom information about their highest attained education is not available are excluded. For roughly one third of the immigrants in the sample, we do not have information about their highest attained level of education, either because they do not have a Danish education or because they have not responded to surveys conducted by Statistics Denmark in 1999 and 2003 about their foreign-acquired education. Despite efforts by Statistics Denmark to impute values for the levels of education for these individuals, we have chosen not to include them in our analysis.<sup>12</sup> Incidentally, it must be stressed that we have no way of ascertaining the quality of the survey-based information on immigrants’ foreign-acquired education. We restrict our analysis to include only wage-earners who have worked what corresponds to at least two months full-time in a given year<sup>13</sup> and we exclude wage-earners who are employed in the military or as legislators, senior officials and managers<sup>14</sup> . The reason for the former restriction is that we do not want the results to be affected by short-term employment spells such as summer-time jobs, which may be characterized by higher degrees of overeducation than more permanent jobs. The reason for the latter restriction is that these two occupational groups are so heterogeneous that it does not make sense to attempt to define which levels of educations are appropriate for these jobs. Appendix Tables A1 and A2 detail the number of observations lost in each step of this sample selection process. In the forthcoming text, we will use the term “immigrants“ to refer to this particular sample and so the reader must bear in mind its restrictions, particularly because the final sample cannot be taken as being representative of the immigrant population. In the econometric estimations, the samples are restricted even further by considering only individuals who have either a vocational education or a short, medium, or long higher education (the reason for this is discussed in more detail in section 5.2). Appendix Table A3 shows mean values and standard deviations of the sample used in the econometric estimations, whilst Appendix Table 4 compares – for selected variables – the samples resulting from the first selection process (shown in Appendix Tables A1 and A2 and used in the descriptive Tables 1-15 below), the sample used in the econometric estimations (results of which are reported in Tables 16-17), and a comparison sample consisting of male 30-57 year-old firstgeneration immigrants from non-Western countries.

> 12 The original survey conducted in 1999 covered approximately 160,000 individuals. The overall response rate was 49.7%, but it varied quite substantially from group to group. It was especially low among Turks (30.1%) and Somalis (31.5%), but also fairly low for Moroccans (38.2%), Lebanese (35.1%) and Pakistanis (38.8%). (Mørkeberg 2000). It is therefore important to stress that the sample used in this study is not a representative sample of male immigrants in Denmark. For immigrants who did not respond to the survey (and who do not have a Danish education), information about their education has been imputed by Statistics Denmark based on their country of origin, age at migration, current age and sex. Because of serious concerns about the quality of this imputation, however, we have chosen to delete these individuals from the analysis.

> 13 Some individuals have unreliable registered wages. These are excluded from the sample.

> 14 These are DISCO (the Danish equivalent to the International Standard Classification of Occupations, ISCO) codes 0 and 1.

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