Social assimilation and immigrants’ labour market outcomes

We analyse how immigrants’ level of social assimilation is related to their labour market outcomes. More precisely, we estimate the association between assimilation and employment, wages, underemployment, three measures of job satisfaction, overeducation and wages. Using Australian longitudinal data, we find that assimilation is strongly associated with employment and wages as well as a number of job satisfaction measures. We then split our data and repeat the analysis for before and after the financial crisis of 2008–2009. We find important differences in the way assimilation is associated with different measures of labour market outcomes under different economic conditions. Finally, we explore mechanisms that may underlie the results.

Vocational training for unemployed youth in Latvia

We analyze the effectiveness of a vocational training (VT) programme targeting unemployed youth in Latvia, contributing to the scant literature on active labour market policies in transition countries. The programme we analyse is part of the Youth Guarantee scheme (2014–2020), the largest action launched by the European Union to combat youth unemployment after the 2008 financial crisis. Although the programme was targeted to youths aged between 15 and 29, priority was given to those younger than 25 years of age. We exploit this eligibility rule in a fuzzy regression discontinuity design framework to estimate the impact of VT participation on the probability of being employed and gross monthly labour income at given dates after the training. Using rich administrative data, we find that the age priority rule increased programme participation for the youngest group by about 10 percentage points. However, participation in the programme did not lead to statistically significant positive effects in labour market outcomes. We argue that this result could be due to some specific characteristics of the programme, namely the voucher system (potentially inducing lock-in effects) and the type of training (classroom instead of on-the-job training). Moreover, the programme was targeted at ex-ante low-employable individuals (e.g. without vocational qualifications), a fact that is confirmed by our analysis of the characteristics of the population of compliers with the age priority rule.

How the earnings growth of US immigrants was underestimated

Two radically different descriptions of immigrant earnings trajectories in the USA have emerged. One asserts that immigrant men, following the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, have low initial earnings and high earnings growth. Another asserts that the post-1965 immigrants have low initial earnings and low earnings growth. We describe the methodological issues that create this divide and show that low earnings growth becomes high earnings growth when immigrants are followed from their initial years in the USA; earnings growth is allowed to vary with entry earnings; and—when following cohorts instead of individuals—sample restrictions commonly used by labor economists are avoided.

Child marriage and infant mortality: causal evidence from Ethiopia

This study assesses the causal effect of child marriage on infant mortality. Using age discontinuities in exposure to a law that raised the legal age of marriage for women in Ethiopia, the study estimates that a 1-year delay in a woman’s age at cohabitation during her teenage years reduces the probability of her first-born child dying during infancy by 3.8 percentage points. This impact is closely linked to the effect of delaying cohabitation on women’s age at first birth.

Social Mobility and Political Regimes: Intergenerational Mobility in Hungary, 1949–2017

This paper measures social mobility rates in Hungary during the period 1949 to 2017, using surnames to measure social status. In those years, there were two very different social regimes. The first was the Hungarian People’s Republic (1949–1989), which was a communist regime with an avowed aim of favouring the working class. The second is the modern liberal democracy (1989–2017), which is a free-market economy. We find five surprising things. First, social mobility rates were low for both upper- and lower-class families during 1949–2017, with an underlying intergenerational status correlation of 0.6–0.8. Second, social mobility rates under communism were the same as in the subsequent capitalist regime. Third, the Romani minority throughout both periods showed even lower social mobility rates. Fourth, the descendants of the eighteenth-century noble class in Hungary were still significantly privileged in 1949 and later. And fifth, although social mobility rates did not change measurably during the transition, the composition of the political elite changed rapidly and sharply.

Return migrants and the wage premium: does the legal status of migrants matter?

This paper examines the impact of the legal status of overseas migrants on their wages upon return to the home country. Using unique data from Egypt, which allows us to distinguish between return migrants according to whether their international migration was documented or undocumented, we examine the impact of illegal status on wages upon return. Relying on a Conditional Mixed Process model, which takes into account the selection into emigration, into return, and into the legal status of temporary migration, we find that, upon return, undocumented migrants experience a wage penalty compared with documented migrants, as well as relative to non-migrants. Our results are the first to show the impact of undocumented migration on the migrant upon return to the country of origin.