Artikli pealkiri: Over-education in Estonia: Persistence, state dependence, and the COVID-19 shock. A dynamic panel analysis
Autor: Simona Ferraro - TalTech, Majandusanalüüsi ja rahanduse instituut

Lühikokkuvõte:

Persistence in labour-market mismatch may reflect a genuine causal carry-over — being mismatched today makes mismatch tomorrow more likely — or merely stable unobserved heterogeneity that renders some workers chronically prone to it. Distinguishing the two is an econometric problem, and it matters: only the former describes a trap that policy can usefully target. I address it for Estonia using twelve years of longitudinal European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) data (2013–2024) and a dynamic random-effects probit that combines the Wooldridge (2005) initial-conditions correction with the Mundlak (1978) device for correlated individual effects, identifying genuine state dependence from the coefficient on lagged over-education once the initial state and time-invariant heterogeneity are controlled for. State dependence is real but modest: most of the very high raw persistence is attributable to stable unobserved heterogeneity rather than to a causal effect of past mismatch. Two further results sharpen the picture: a worker’s own recent unemployment raises mismatch risk independently of aggregate conditions, an individual-level scarring channel, and it is the size rather than the growth of a worker’s occupation that protects against mismatch. Exploiting the position of the COVID-19 shock in the interior of the sample, an event-study specification that interacts lagged mismatch with each year shows that state dependence is not constant over the cycle but intensifies specifically in 2020, an effect absent from placebo tests on non-crisis years. Over-education in Estonia thus behaves as a trap rather than a stepping stone — one that macroeconomic shocks can deepen — though selection, not causation, accounts for most of its observed persistence.

Tallinna Tehnikaülikooli majandusanalüüsi ja rahanduse instituudi avatud teadusseminarid toimuvad tavaliselt kuu teisel ja neljandal kolmapäeval nii kohapealse kui ka veebis osalemisvõimalusega, kui ei ole teatatud teisiti. Ettekanne kestab u 45 minutit, millele järgneb veerand tundi arutelu. Seminar toimub inglise keeles. Ettekande aluseks olev artikkel on üldjuhul kättesaadav seminaril kohapeal. Küsimuste korral võib pöörduda seminari koordinaatori Karsten Staehri [email protected] poole.