Projects
What is the Role of Firms in Immigrants’ Labor Market Integration?
As industrialized countries face demographic challenges from aging populations, labor recruitment programs have emerged as a critical policy tool to address workforce shortages. From the EU Blue Card Directive to the U.S. H-1B visa program, governments increasingly rely on employer-driven immigration systems to meet labor market demands.
This project examines the role of firms in immigrant labor market integration by studying Germany’s extensive Labor Recruitment Program (1955-1973), which brought millions of so-called “guest workers” to the country. By digitizing historical records of recruited workers from 1961 to 1973 and linking them to administrative social security data from 1975 onwards, we create a unique dataset that tracks immigrants’ labor market trajectories over decades. The project investigates which types of firms—high-paying or low-paying, high-productivity or low-productivity—recruited foreign workers, and analyzes how placement with these initial employers affected immigrants’ medium- and long-term career outcomes.
Project Participants:
Sulin Sardoschau (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Knowledge Spillover and Individual Careers
Workers obtain skills not only through formal education and training, but also through learning by doing at the workplace. Such skill acquisition at the workplace may partly operate through learning from coworkers. However, evidence on knowledge spillover among co-workers is still inconclusive, and most existing evidence has focused on high-skilled workers. This project will produce the first study to provide direct micro-level evidence on knowledge spillover from well-trained workers (apprenticeship graduates) onto their lower skilled coworkers. The main part of the project focuses on knowledge spillover onto unskilled labour market entrants without formal qualifications, a group that is vulnerable to job loss and low labour market attachment. In an extension, the analysis will shift to other groups of workers whose skills are low or require updating, most notably immigrant workers (whose skills require adaptation to the host country labour market) or older workers (whose skills may have become obsolete due to technological change). Knowledge spillovers at the workplace have obvious important implications: in the presence of knowledge spillovers, the return to investment into training can be far larger than the sum of returns to trained workers.
Project Participants:
Christian Dustmann (University College London)
Uta Schönberg (University College London)
International Migration in the European Union: Evidence from Linked Register Data
The current policy discussion in many countries is concerned with skills shortage or the lack of workers in an expanding list of key occupations. A potential solution to the shortages could be increased mobility of workers with the required skills, a goal that also featured prominently in motivation for the common EU labor market.
This project studies the mobility of workers across two EU countries, Austria and Germany. It exploits novel linked register data from social security administrations in Germany and Austria, which enables us to construct longitudinal information on employment spells and earnings in both countries. Thereby the data allows us to observe complete career profiles of individual workers who migrate from Austria to Germany or vice versa.
The findings from this project will contribute to a better understanding of the motives for migration, the consequences of moving on workers’ career outcomes, the impacts of economic shocks and welfare policies on migration flows, and information transmission via migrant networks.
By providing evidence on migrant careers from two countries, the project makes novel contributions to the literature that was traditionally studying international migration from the perspective of a single country. The findings will also complement existing research on internal migration within one country by pointing out differences between national and international migration.
Project Participants:
David Card (University of California, Berkeley)
Rudolf Winter-Ebmer (Johannes Kepler University Linz)
Wolfgang Frimmel (Johannes Kepler University Linz)
Julia Schmieder (ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin)
Workplace connections, migration, and firm quality: evidence from German reunification
Modern labor markets display substantial inequality across regions and along gender lines. One reason for that is a lack of information about labor market opportunities.
This project examines the role of informational friction. It consists of two closely related sub-projects, which assess whether pre-established social connections at the workplace can help bridge the informational gap about labor market opportunities and help reduce inequalities in labor market outcomes.
The project is set against the backdrop of persistent within-country differences between East and West Germany. The unexpected fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 unified two vastly dissimilar economic systems and triggered extensive population movements. After an initial surge, East-West migration rapidly slowed down. This slowdown was despite continuing economic opportunities and well-being disparities, which are evident even 30 years after reunification. The project first examines how the social connections of East German workers with co-workers who migrated to West Germany earlier can provide information about labor market opportunities in West Germany and whether and how this information is used. It then addresses gender inequality, asking whether gender differences in network connections and how networks are used can explain disparities in labor market outcomes.
Project Participants:
Alexandra Spitz-Oener (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
