Citizenship and Employment – comparing two cool countries

Over the last decades, both Canada and Sweden have liberalized citizenship regulations for permanent residents. During the same period, immigration patterns by country of birth have changed substantially, with an increasing number of immigrants arriving from non-western countries. The aim of this paper is to explore the link between citizenship and employment probabilities for immigrants in both countries, controlling for a range of demographic, human capital, and municipal characteristics such as city and co-ethnic population size. We use data from the 2006 Canadian census and Swedish register data (STATIV) for the year 2006. Both STATIV and the Census, include similar sets of demographic, socio-economic and immigrant specific. We use instrumental variable regression to examine the 'clean' impact of citizenship acquisition and the size of the co-immigrant population on the probability of being employed in both countries. We find that citizenship acquisition has a positive influence on employment probabilities in both Canada and Sweden. The size of the co-ethnic population has a positive impact for many immigrant groups--as the co-ethnic population increases, the probability of being employed also increases.