This paper uses two recent UK surveys to investigate labour market performance, the determinants of language proficiency, and the effect of language on earnings and employment probabilities of non-white immigrants. Our results show that language acquisition, employment probabilities, as well as...

There are concerns about the attachment of immigrants to the labor force, and the potential policy responses. This paper uses a bi-national survey on immigrant performance to investigate the sorting of individuals into full-time paid-employment and entrepreneurship and their economic success....

This paper uses data on very small UK geographies to investigate the effective size of local labor markets. Our approach treats geographic space as continuous, as opposed to a collection of non-overlapping administrative units, thus avoiding problems of mismeasurement of local labor markets...

We study the impact of job proximity on individual employment and earnings. The analysis exploits a Swedish refugee dispersal policy to get exogenous variation in individual locations. Using very detailed data on the exact location of all residences and workplaces in Sweden, we find that having...

Many developed countries, e.g. the UK, Germany, and Sweden, use or have used settlement policies to direct the inflow of new immigrants away from immigrant dense metropolitan areas. We evaluate a reform of Swedish immigration policy that featured dispersion of refugee immigrants across the...

Recent immigrants tend to locate in ethnic ‘enclaves’ within metropolitan areas. The economic consequence of living in such enclaves is still an unresolved issue. We use an immigrant policy initiative in Sweden, when government authorities distributed refugee immigrants across locales in a...

The attitudes of ethnic majority populations towards other communities is a potentially important determinant of social exclusion and of the welfare of ethnic minorities. The suggestion that negative attitudes towards minorities may be affected by the ethnic composition of the locality in which...

This paper summarizes the study design of the Rural–Urban Migration in China and Indonesia (RUMiCI) project. We first discuss the overall distribution of migrants in Indonesia and the selection of survey cities. Next, we describe the process of identifying the migration status of each...

We study barriers to labor mobility using panel data on gross region-to-region migration flows in Russia for 1995-2010. We find that barriers that hindered internal migration in 1990s have been generally eliminated by the end of 2000s. In 1990s many poor Russian regions were in poverty traps:...

This paper provides descriptive evidence about the distribution of wages and skills in denser and less dense employment areas in France. We confirm that on average, workers in denser areas are more skilled. There is also strong overrepresentation of workers with particularly high and low skills...