This paper investigates whether and to what extent immigrants in Germany are integrated into German society by utilizing a variety of qualitative information and subjective data collected in the 1999 wave of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). To this end, leisure-time activities and...

Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving...

The economic literature has largely overlooked the importance of repeat and circular migration. The paper studies this behavior by analyzing the number of exits and the total number of years away from the host country using count data models and panel data from Germany. More than 60% of migrants...

Immigrants in many countries have lower employment rates and lower earnings than natives. In this paper, we ask whether a more liberal access to citizenship can improve the economic integration of immigrants. Our analysis relies on two major immigration reforms in Germany, a country with a...

This chapter summarizes the literature on the evaluation of immigration policies. It brings together two strands of the literature dealing with the evaluation of labor market programs and with the economic integration of immigrants. Next to immigrant selection and settlement policies, there are...

The flight and expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe during and after World War II constitutes one of the largest forced population movements in history. We analyze the economic integration of these forced migrants and their offspring in West Germany. The empirical results suggest that even a...

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we examined the impact of social contacts on immigrant occupational status and income. In addition to general social contacts, we also analyzed the effects of bonding (i.e., co-ethnic) and bridging (i.e., interethnic) ties on economic outcomes....

This paper investigates the transferability of human capital across countries and the contribution of imperfect human capital portability to the explanation of the immigrant-native wage gap. Using data for West Germany, our results reveal that, overall, education and labor market experience...

Assessing the migration potential and predicting future migration streams are among the most relevant, yet least well understood topics of migration research. The usual approach taken to address aggregate-level prediction problems is to fit ad hoc specifications to historical data, and to...

Based on a wage curve approach we examine the labor market effects of migration in Germany. The wage curve relies on the assumption that wages respond to a change in the unemployment rate, albeit imperfectly. This allows one to derive the wage and employment effects of migration simultaneously...