The Labor Market Effects of Restricting Refugees' Employment Opportunities
Joint with Achim Ahrens, Andreas Beerli, Selina Kurer, and Dominik Hangartner. IZA Discussion Paper No. 15901, Updated version (December 2023). Revise and resubmit (2nd round), American Economic Review
Abstract: Refugees, and immigrants more generally, often do not have access to all jobs in the labor market. We argue that restrictions on employment opportunities help explain why immigrants have lower employment and wages than native citizens. To test this hypothesis, we leverage refugees’ exogenous geographic assignment in Switzerland, within-canton variation in labor market restrictions, and linked register data 1999–2016. We document large negative employment and earnings effects of banning refugees from working in the first months after arrival, from working in certain sectors and regions, and from prioritizing residents over refugees. Consistent with an effect of outside options on wages, removing 10% of jobs reduces refugees’ hourly wages by 2.8% and increases the wage gap to similar host-country citizens in similar jobs by 2.2%. Furthermore, we show that restrictions reduce refugees’ earnings even after they cease applying. Restrictions do not spur refugee emigration nor improve earnings of non-refugee immigrants.
Intergenerational Mobility in 15 Destination Countries
Joint with Leah Boustan, Matthias F. Jensen, Ran Abramitzky, Elisa Jácome, Alan Manning, Santiago Pérez, Analysia Watley, and the rest of the immigration consortium. Working Paper (ungated), IZA Discussion Paper No. 17711, NBER Working Paper 33558. Revise and resubmit, American Economic Review
Abstract: We estimate intergenerational mobility of immigrants and their children in fifteen receiving countries. We document large income gaps for first-generation immigrants that diminish in the second generation. Around half of the second-generation gap can be explained by differences in parental income, with the remainder due to differential rates of absolute mobility. The daughters of immigrants enjoy higher absolute mobility than daughters of locals in most destinations, while immigrant sons primarily enjoy this advantage in countries with long histories of immigration. Cross-country differences in absolute mobility are not driven by parental country-of-origin, but instead by destination labor markets and immigration policy.
Adapting to Scarcity: The Role of Firms in Occupational Transitions
Joint with Jeremias Kläui, Daniel Kopp, and Rafael Lalive. CEPR Discussion Paper No. 21027, RFBerlin Discussion Paper No. 020/26. This project was financed by the National Research Program on Digital Transformation NRP-77.
Abstract: This paper examines the circumstances under which firms facilitate occupational transitions, complementing prior work that focuses on workers’ decisions. We link unemployment insurance records with application diaries and clickstream data from a recruitment platform to causally assess how candidates’ occupational histories shape recruiters’ hiring decisions. We find that the average candidate from a different occupation faces a 7% lower contact rate than equally qualified candidates who last worked in a recruiter’s searched occupation. Using a new measure of skill overlap, we show that 60% of this penalty reflects that movers meet fewer skill requirements than incumbents. Occupational experience and qualifications further reduce the mover penalty, such that certain candidates returning to a prior occupation face no penalty at all. Finally, recruiters adapt to scarcity and contact more movers in tight occupations. Changes in firm behavior account for one-third of the increase in movers’ application success in tight versus slack labor markets.
How Ethnic Discrimination Varies across Recruiters and with the Candidate Pool: Evidence and Implications for Unemployment
Joint with Daniel Kopp and Dominik Hangartner. Draft available at request. This project is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation
Abstract: This paper examines whether ethnic discrimination is common among recruiters, depends on the applicant pool, and prolongs minorities' unemployment. We peer over recruiters' shoulders when making actual hiring decisions by tracking their clicks on the online recruitment platform of the Swiss public employment service. Estimating minorities' contact penalties relative to otherwise equivalent Swiss job seekers for individual recruiters, we find that ethnic discrimination varies substantially across recruiters but is nevertheless widespread: almost one-third of recruiters discriminates non-Europeans statistically significantly. Discrimination against Non-Europeans increases with the number of candidates for the job. Discrimination against Europeans does not, as Europeans face less discrimination if they compete with more non-Swiss candidates. Finally, we match the job seekers on the platform to their entries in the Swiss unemployment register. We find evidence that discrimination contributes to explaining why minority job seekers are unemployed longer compared to similar Swiss job seekers. Our results suggest that ethnic discrimination is prevalent among recruiters and prolongs minorities' unemployment, particularly in slack labor markets.
Host Country Citizenship Reduces Hiring Discrimination against Immigrant Minorities
Joint with Daniel Kopp and Dominik Hangartner. Draft available at request. This project is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation
Abstract: Persistent labor market discrimination diminishes the capacity of immigrants to achieve economic success and contribute to the host economy. Despite the prevalence of racial and ethnic discrimination in many immigrant-receiving countries, we lack a reliable understanding of policies that can alleviate it. This study provides evidence that host country citizenship substantially reduces hiring discrimination. To generate valid comparisons of immigrants and native citizens and address selection into naturalization, we leverage hiring data from a large online recruitment platform operated by the Swiss public employment services. Our online trace data enable us to monitor recruiter search behavior and statistically adjust for all jobseeker characteristics that are visible on the platform. This approach allows us to compare recruiter contact rates for otherwise similar immigrants with and without host-country citizenship, for native citizens, and for newly naturalized immigrants before and after naturalization. We find that non-citizen European immigrants are 7.9% (CI 6.9-8.9) and non-European immigrants are 13.9% (CI 12.5-15.4) less likely to be contacted than observably similar native citizens. Host country citizenship lowers the hiring penalty for European immigrants to 6.\% (CI 5.7-7.7%), amounting to a 15% decline, and to 8.1% (CI 6.6-9.5%) for non-European immigrants (-42%). Additional analyses suggest that host-country citizenship helps European immigrants access public-sector jobs, accounting for almost the entire passport effect for this group.
Selected further work in progress
The Prevalence of Discriminatory Attitudes and Their Consequences on Job Search and Hiring
Joint with Dominik Hangartner and Kristina Schüpbach. This project is financed by the NCCR on the move.
The Role of Wages and Fringe Benefits in Job Search: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment
Joint with Andreas Beerli, Stefano Fiorin, Andreas Gulyas, Daniel Kopp, and Masha Khoshnama. This project is financed by the National Research Program on Digital Transformation NRP-77
Golden Shackles? The Effects of Pension Portability on Job Mobility and Wages
Joint with Enea Baselgia, Simon Jäger, and Benjamin Schoefer
The Labor Market Effects of Extending Collective Bargaining Coverage
Joint with Arindrajit Dube and Dina Pomeranz. This project is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation
The Effects of Generative AI on Unemployment and Job Search
Joint with David Dorn, Giulian Etingin-Frati, Jeremias Kläui, and Andreas Müller. This project is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation