College degree supply, productivity spillovers and occupational allocation of graduates in Central European countries

Public funding drives much of the recent growth of college degree supply in Europe, but few indicators are available to assess its optimal level. In this paper, we investigate an indicator of college skills usage - the fraction of college graduates employed in "college" occupations. Gottschalk and Hansen (2003) propose to identify "college" occupations based on withinoccupation college wage premia; we build on their strategy to study the local-labor-market relationship between the share of college graduates in the population and the use of college skills. Empirical results based on worker-level data from NUTS-4 districts in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia suggest a positive relationship, thus supporting the presence of an endogenous influence of the number of skilled workers on the demand for them. -- education ; labor demand ; college degree supply ; occupational allocation ; productivity spillovers