The income gap between natives and second generation immigrants in Sweden: is skill the explanation? (original) (raw)
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Income Gap between Natives and Second Generation Immigrants in Sweden: Is Skill the Explanation?
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2007
The Income Gap Between Natives and Second Generation Immigrants in Sweden: Is Skill the Explanation? * This is the first study to use an achievement test score to analyze whether the income gap between second-generation immigrants and natives is caused by a skill gap rather than ethnic discrimination. Since, in principle, every male Swedish citizen takes the test when turning 18, we are able to bring more evidence to bear on the matter by estimating the income gap for a very large sample of individuals who are of the same age and have the same years of schooling at the test date. Once the result of the Swedish Military Enlistment Test is controlled for, the income gap almost disappears for second generation immigrants with both parents born in Southern Europe or outside Europe. However, when using a regular set of control variables the income gap becomes overestimated. This difference in results is most likely explained by the fact that schooling is a bad measure of productive skills for these groups of second-generation immigrants. It indicates that they compensate for their lower probability of being employed by investing in (in relation to their skill level) more schooling than otherwise similar natives.
Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 2009
This study uses a cognitive test score, the Swedish Military Enlistment test taken at age 18, to identify whether the ethnic employment and income gap in Sweden is caused by a pre-market skill gap and/or ethnic discrimination. The employment gap and income gap are estimated for males born in Sweden with different ethnic backgrounds: their parents were born in Sweden or in southern Europe or outside Europe. Controlling for the cognitive test score does not affect the ethnic employment gap, and for incomes the ethnic income gap almost disappears.
Wages of Childhood Immigrants in Sweden : Education, Returns to Education and Overeducation
2013
We analyse full-time monthly wages of employees with parents born in Sweden and of childhood immigrants who arrived before the end of compulsory school-age. We use a detailed disaggregation of background countries, which shows considerable hetero-geneity, in overeducation, in returns to education and in birth-country coefficients, unexplained by wage models. Both the non-European childhood immigrants and of those from Southern Europe suffer a wage disadvantage relative to natives, men to a larger extent than women. Returns to education are generally lower for non-European childhood immigrants than for natives. Comparison with workers, who immigrated as adults, shows that the childhood immigrants of most nationalities run lower risk of being overeducated and have a smaller wage disadvantage. The child/adult immigrant difference is larger, the larger the disadvantage of the adult immigrants from a country of origin. But for male childhood immigrants from some of the labour transmitter...
Journal of Population Economics, 2003
Studies of first generation immigrants often show that labour market outcomes differ greatly between different immigrant groups compared to the native population. This issue is also of high importance as regards the children of immigrants, born in the immigrant country. Previous studies have not been able to analyse the labour market outcomes for second-generation immigrants in the way done in this study. We are able to (i) identify several groups of secondgeneration immigrants with different ethnic backgrounds and (ii) identify the parent composition, i.e. whether one or both parents of the individual are foreign born. The results show that the labour market outcomes differ greatly between different groups of second generation immigrants compared to native-born Swedes. The pattern is similar to that in the parent generation. The outcome is more favourable if one parent is born in Sweden compared to having both parents foreign born. There is also a tendency that the outcome is more favourable if the mother is native born than if the father is.
Unequal Opportunities for Young People with Immigrant Backgrounds in the Swedish Labour Market
This paper investigates labour-market performance for 'young people with immigrant backgrounds' and those 'born in Sweden with native-born parents' in the Swedish labour market. It focuses on young people who were aged 18-20 during 1990, and their labour-market status after 8 years, in 1998. The results indicate that young people of immigrant descent have lower annual wage income and are at higher risk of not being employed than those born in Sweden with nativeborn parents. Differences in human capital characteristics cannot explain these results. Other theories, which stress the effect of discriminatory behaviour and the power of social network composition, are discussed as alternative interpretations. Having one native-born parent is considered to be important to labour market success. However, having a native-born father rather than a native-born mother is associated with better labour-market achievement.
Human capital transmission and the earnings of second-generation immigrants in Sweden
IZA Journal of Migration, 2012
We compare the earnings and the intergenerational earnings mobility of immigrants with natives in Sweden. We find an overall convergence in average earnings between immigrants and natives across generations. This convergence hides a divergence in average earnings between groups of immigrants with different ethnic origins. We also find that, on average, immigrants have lower intergenerational earnings mobility within groups with similar ethnic backgrounds. Immigrant groups with relatively low intergenerational earnings mobility increased their average relative earnings in the second generation. The interpretation of this is that immigrant groups with a high degree of intergenerational transmission of human capital from parent to offspring improve their position on the labor market across generations.
Effect of immigration on Sweden natives' wages : The post-secondary and post-graduate case
2014
Immigration has increased in Sweden during the last decade; increasing from 64,087 immigrants in 2001 to 113,117 in 2012. This trend has become an important topic for politicians, policy makers and the academic community, who concern about the effect of immigration over the native population in Sweden. The aim of our paper is to focus on the most educated immigrants, so we choose to study the impact of post-secondary graduate and postgraduate immigrant workers. Following this issue our paper asks the following question: has immigration affected positively or negatively native workers' wages in a specific education-experience cohort in the primary counties in Sweden from 2001 to 2012? To give an answer to this question we categorize workers into experience-education groups in the primary counties in Sweden for the period between 2001 and 2012. We use the classification groups in a three-level CES production function specification; the CES specification helps us to calculate the elasticity of substitution across experience classes and across education groups. These estimates enable us to calculate the factor price elasticties, the percent change in the log average monthly wage due to a percent change in the supply of immigrant workers. The factor price elasticties imply a negative effect of immigration over the log average monthly wages for natives in Sweden in the period between 2001 and 2012.
Overeducation among immigrants in Sweden: incidence, wage effects and state dependence
IZA Journal of Migration, 2014
The utilization and reward of the human capital of immigrants in the labor market of the host country has been studied extensively. In the Swedish context this question is of great policy relevance due to the high levels of refugee migration and inflow of tied movers. Using Swedish register data covering the period 2001-2008, we analyze the incidence and wage effects of overeducation among non-Western immigrants. We also analyze whether there is state-dependence in overeducation and extend the immigrant educational mismatch literature by investigating whether this is a more severe problem among immigrants than among natives. In line with previous research we find that the incidence of overeducation is higher among immigrants and the return to overeducation is lower indicating that immigrants lose more from being overeducated. We find a high degree of state-dependence in overeducation both among natives and immigrants, but to a higher extent among immigrants.
Immigrants' return to schooling in Sweden
The aim of this paper is to examine if the returns to immigrants’ schooling are lower than the returns to natives’ schooling. In addition the paper tries to establish whether immigrants who invest in different amounts of Swedish education also differ in their returns to schooling. The results show that the difference in returns to schooling between immigrants and natives is generally quite small. Moreover, the returns to schooling are considerably higher for immigrants who arrived in Sweden during compulsory school age than for immigrants who arrived in Sweden after compulsory school age. Moreover, immigrants who complete their schooling in Sweden have, in general, much higher returns than immigrants with only foreign schooling.
Early labour-market experiences of second-generation immigrants in Sweden
Applied Economics, 2007
This paper investigates second generation immigrant's early labour-market performances in Sweden. To study their labourmarket success we estimate dynamic transition rate models -Cox type proportional hazards, in a competing risk framework using register based panel-data set. Our results reveal that parental resources a¤ect not only second-generation immigrants' continuing education but also their later labour-market success. The study veri…es that …nding a job is di¢ cult for second-generation immigrants and the signi…cant unobserved-heterogeneity parameter estimate may indicate discrimination. As a whole, secondgeneration immigrants have worse labour-market performances compared to their native-born counterparts.