Citizenship acquisition, employment prospects and earnings: comparing two cool countries

Direct country comparisons on the effect of citizenship are rare. The aim of this paper is to analyse the citizenship effect on both employment probabilities and the relative income of work of immigrants in two countries, Canada and Sweden. We ask 'Is there a citizenship effect and if any, in which country is it that we find the largest effect and for which immigrant groups'. Using Instrumental Variable Regression to assess the clean effect of citizenship acquisition on data from the 2006 Canadian census and the 2006 Swedish registry we find that citizenship has a positive impact on both characteristics, and that it is often stronger in Sweden than in Canada.