E-skills Mismatch: Evidence from an International Assessment of Adult Competencies

In this report we produce measures of skill mismatch in the domain of problem solving in technology-rich-environments using PIAAC data for the 13 countries of the European Union participating in the programme (plus the US), extending the methodology developed in Pellizzari and Fichen (2013). We define every worker as well-matched if her ICT skills fall in between the minimum and maximum requirement of the occupation in which she is observed, as under-skilled if they fall below the minimum and over-skilled if they are above the maximum. Our results indicate that, on average, about 87% of the workers in our final sample are well-matched, about 10% are over-skilled and 3% under-skilled. Ireland and the Slovak Republic are the countries with the highest incidence of over-skilling (mostly at the expenses of the well-matched) whereas Poland and The Netherlands only have about 5%. Under-skilling is highest in Sweden and Belgium but there seems to be quite a bit less variation in the incidence of under (relative to over)-skilling. These findings contrast sharply with results obtained using other popular methods adopted in the literature.