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: This paper investigates whether employment restrictions contribute to refugees having poorer labor market outcomes than citizens. Using linked register data from Switzerland (1999--2015), we find substantial negative effects on employment and earnings when refugees are barred from working upon arrival, excluded from specific sectors or regions, or face resident prioritization. Consistent with an effect of outside options on wages, removing 10\% of refugees' potential jobs reduces job-to-job mobility by 6.3\% and monthly earnings by 3.2\%, widening the wage gap relative to comparable citizens in similar jobs. The restrictions depress labor market outcomes while they apply and for years afterward.
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: Widespread hiring discrimination limits immigrants’ economic integration and deprives host societies of productive talent. A central but unresolved question is whether policies that grant immigrants formal membership in the host society can reduce discrimination by changing how employers treat otherwise similar applicants. This study provides large-scale behavioral evidence that host-country citizenship reduces unequal treatment in hiring. We analyze clickstream data from the Swiss public employment service’s online recruitment platform, covering 39,687 recruiters, 373,880 searches, and 3.4 million profile views. The platform records which jobseekers recruiters view and contact, while displaying structured information on nationality, names, language skills, education, and work experience. This setting allows us to compare contact rates for observably similar native citizens, non-citizen immigrants, and naturalized immigrants appearing in the same recruiter searches. We use supervised machine learning to adjust for recruiter-visible jobseeker characteristics and their interactions. Non-citizen European immigrants are 7.7\% less likely, and non-European immigrants 13.9\% less likely, to be contacted than comparable native citizens. Swiss citizenship lowers these penalties to 6.7\% and 8.1\%, corresponding to reductions of 13\% and 41\%. Within-person estimates comparing the same immigrants before and after naturalization corroborate this pattern. Mechanism analyses suggest that citizenship mainly relaxes public-sector barriers for European immigrants. For non-European immigrants, it appears to reduce uncertainty about productivity, consistent with a reduction in statistical discrimination. These findings show that citizenship can shape not only immigrants’ rights and incentives, but also how employers interpret immigrant background during hiring.
Selected further work in progress
Discrimination and Job Search Outcomes
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 Matthias Bing, Arindrajit Dube, Nicolas Marti, and Dina Pomeranz. This project is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation
AI and Unemployment: Evidence from Switzerland
Joint with David Dorn, Giulian Etingin-Frati, Jeremias Kläui, and Andreas Müller. This project is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation
Corporate Tax Cuts and Immigration: Evidence from Switzerland
Co-authors: Marius Brülhart, Guillaume Rais, Enea Baselgia, Jeremias Kläui
Status: Draft in progress
Minimum Wages and Amenities
Co-authors: Andreas Gulyas, Giulian Etingin-Frati. This project is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation
Status: Draft in progress