Russian Migrants to Russia : Assimilation and Local Labor Market Effects

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 has given rise to massive population movements among the newly independent countries that were formerly Soviet republics. Five million Russian and Russian-speaking people repatriated to Russia during 1990-2002. In this paper I study labor market assimilation of Russian migrants to Russia and their effect on the employment and wages of the local population at the regional level. I use the data from a large-scale household survey in Russia for 1995-2009 together with regional level statistical data. The results show that male immigrants arriving during 1990s were fully integrated into the labor market while female immigrants faced significant wage and employment gaps on arrival and their assimilation was quite slow. Using IV strategy to account for the endogenous choice of the place of residence by immigrants I find a negative effect of the inflows of immigrants on the local population's employment but not on wages