Career Mobility, Job Match, and Overeducation

Many workers are mismatched with their jobs. While many factors contribute to mismatch, overeducation is attracting increased attention. Several reasons have been put forth to explain why overeducation exists in the labor market. Sicherman [1991] hypothesizes that overeducation may be part of a career mobility process. Workers temporarily accept jobs for which they are overqualified in exchange for training. This paper reports on alternative tests examining the career mobility hypothesis. Overeducated workers appear more likely to move to better jobs over time. However, contrary to the career mobility hypothesis, they are less likely than adequately educated workers to feel that the skills they are acquiring will help them on future jobs.

Agglomeration and Job Matching among College Graduates

We study one potential source of urban agglomeration economies: better job matching. Focusing on college graduates, we construct two direct measures of job matching based on how well an individual's job corresponds to his or her college education. Consistent with matching-based theories of urban agglomeration, we find evidence that larger and thicker local labor markets help college graduates find better jobs by increasing both the likelihood and quality of a match. We then assess the extent to which better job matching of college-educated workers increases individual-level wages and thereby contributes to the urban wage premium. While we find that college graduates with better job matches do indeed earn higher wages on average, the contribution of such job matching to aggregate urban productivity appears to be relatively modest

Development of a Medicaid Behavioral Health Case-Mix Model

Many Medicaid programs have either fully or partially carved out mental health services. The evaluation of carve-out plans requires a case-mix model that accounts for differing health status across Medicaid managed care plans. This article develops a diagnosis-based case-mix adjustment system specific to Medicaid behavioral health care. Several different model specifications are compared that use untransformed, square root transformed, and log-transformed expenditures. </jats:p