The impact of job–education match on graduate salaries and job satisfaction

The paper estimates the determinants and effects of the job–education field match on graduates’ salaries and job satisfaction taking the merged data from the Russian Labour Force Survey and the National Survey of Graduate Employment, both conducted in 2016. The authors use various measures of the horizontal job–education match: the respondents’ self-assessment and the objective measure derived from job and education fields codes from the corresponding classifiers. The analysis has shown that the probability of having a job in accordance with the received education is higher for graduates in the sphere of medical, computer and law sciences. There is a penalty for mismatched from 6% to 13% compared to those working accordingly the received diploma. The higher the degree of the mismatch - the greater the penalty. The size of penalty depends on major and on the match measure used. The study revealed the negative impact of the job–education horizontal mismatch on job satisfaction, which provides some evidence that the mismatch is mostly involuntary.