Gender-Specific Analysis of Self-Reported Health and Educational Mismatch: Evidence from Employees in Russia

Abstract Our paper investigates the influence of vertical educational mismatch—overeducation and undereducation—on selected EQ-5D metrics, namely pain and anxiety/depression. We conduct a gender-specific analysis and estimate ordered probit models for our categorical dependent variables by using a sample of currently working employees from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey. Since our health outcomes are self-reported, we challenge the validity of the results obtained by using the ordered probit model and enrich the analysis by correcting our estimates for the presence of reporting heterogeneity bias. To do that, we merge the RLMS-HSE (2005) with externally collected anchoring vignettes for Russia from the World Health Survey (2003) and estimate a hierarchical ordered probit (HOPIT) model. The HOPIT estimates show that in several cases, educational mismatch affects the reporting style of respondents. Our findings provide evidence that, after adjusting for reporting heterogeneity, undereducation has a negative influence on the physical component of health (proxied by pain) for women, while overeducation affects the psychological component of health (proxied by anxiety/depression) in both gender groups. Overeducated women appear to have better psychological health, while overeducated men have worse psychological health than their matched counterparts.