Australia has witnessed a massive increase in tertiary educated labour force participants, and especially so in the last 30 years. Thus, a study into graduate overeducation in Australia is pertinent in understanding this increasingly important subset of the labour force. This thesis is the first investigation of graduate overeducation in Australia. It seeks to investigate the depth of this phenomenon among various graduate sub-groups in the labour market, including females and immigrants. The thesis hopes to broaden current knowledge by offering a comprehensive account of graduate overeducation in Australia from various perspectives. There is no universalistic theory of overeducation from which a multitude of theories and assumptions can be tried and tested. Hence, this thesis begins by defining the phenomenon before discussing the various theories and methods used to study overeducation. This is especially necessary given the paucity of research into overeducation in Australia. This thesis utilises a variety of measures and datasets to study graduate overeducation in Australia. The commonly employed Over, Under and Required (ORU) earnings function is used as the main measure of calculating returns to overeducation while the Job Analysis / Objective measure is the main method utilised in calculating incidences of graduate overeducation. The thesis does however depart from standard tests of overeducation in a number of respects. First, it controls for self selection into employment in determining the causes of graduate overeducation by using bivariate probit models. Second, it uses a synthetic panel dataset to control for unobserved heterogeneity which potentially bias results obtained from cross-sectional datasets. Third, it utilises an immigrant-specific longitudinal dataset that provides a natural experiment to assess changes in policy and their effect on graduate overeducation in Australia among immigrant groups. Fourth, it provides some of the first econometric evidence on the relationship between various ...