IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/apacel/v39y2025i1p49-64.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The over‐education wage penalty across the wage distribution: a case study of STEM PhD holders in South Korea

Author

Listed:
  • Kihong Park

Abstract

To date the analysis on the wage penalty faced by over‐educated doctorate holders is surprisingly scarce. Being focused on college graduates, the existing literature has primarily tended to adopt a standard ordinary least squares regression technique that allows measuring the impact of over‐education on the conditional mean of the wage distribution. This paper aims to fill this gap, not only by assessing the extent to which the prevalence of over‐educated doctorate holders in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields in South Korea is distributed across the wage distribution, but also by examining the extent to which their wage penalty relative to what they could have earned in a job corresponding to their level of education may have varied across the wage distribution. The main findings reveal that there is no evidence to support the notion that over‐education and ability are inversely related among STEM doctorate holders in Korea. Based on the empirical evidence, this article suggests that it is an oversimplification to characterise both the incidence and the wage effects of over‐education as merely reflecting lower‐ability levels, at least in the Korean context.

Suggested Citation

  • Kihong Park, 2025. "The over‐education wage penalty across the wage distribution: a case study of STEM PhD holders in South Korea," Asian-Pacific Economic Literature, The Crawford School, The Australian National University, vol. 39(1), pages 49-64, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:apacel:v:39:y:2025:i:1:p:49-64
    DOI: 10.1111/apel.12425
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/apel.12425
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/apel.12425?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:apacel:v:39:y:2025:i:1:p:49-64. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14678411 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.