Do employers prefer overqualified graduates? A field experiment

We test whether employers prefer overqualified to adequately qualified job candidates. To this end, duos of fictitious applications by bachelor and master graduates are sent to real job openings with a bachelor's degree as a minimum requirement. For the overall sample, we find that overqualified master graduates are 19% more likely to be directly invited for a job interview and 11% more likely to get any positive reaction. This relative advantage for overqualified workers is found to be higher for bottleneck occupations. Relative preferences also differ across employers within labour market segments.

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