Resumen: Over-education may arise from the voluntary decisions of individuals to acquire more qualifications than those required in the workplace, such that over-education may have a signaling role that allows workers to compensate for the lack of certain other skills, or to gain access to the labor market. This paper analyses the signaling role of over-education in Spain, a country characterised by a strongly-segmented labor market with high unemployment levels, and a large number of over-educated. Using micro data for a representative sample of Spanish workers, three different methods are applied to provide evidence that educational mismatch plays a clear signaling role. Policy implications are derived to alleviate inefficiencies in the allocation of educational resources and in the incentives of workers to use over-education as a signal. Idioma: Inglés DOI: 10.1016/j.jpolmod.2019.02.015 Año: 2019 Publicado en: JOURNAL OF POLICY MODELING 41, 1 (2019), 99-119 ISSN: 0161-8938 Factor impacto JCR: 1.486 (2019) Categ. JCR: ECONOMICS rank: 177 / 371 = 0.477 (2019) - Q2 - T2 Factor impacto SCIMAGO: 0.979 - Economics and Econometrics (Q2)