We estimate the causal effect of immigration on unemployment, employment and wages of resident employees in Switzerland, whose foreign labor force has increased by 32.8% in the last ten years. To address endogeneity of immigration into different labor market cells, we develop new variants of the...

This paper looks at the e ffect of cultural barriers on the skill selection of international migration. The data covers bilateral migration stocks by skill level in 2000 from about 99 sending countries to the main 15 destination countries. We use genetic distance as a proxy for cultural distance...

The analysis of how the economic crisis in Europe has reshaped migration flows faces two challenges: (i) the confounding influence of correlated changes in the attractiveness of alternative destinations, and (ii) the role of rapidly changing expectations about the evolution of the economic...

This paper investigates the role that pre-immigration skills play in immigrants job-finding processes in Germany. We first show theoretically that the job-finding rate for the high-skilled varies depending on their search strategy: if they are prepared to look for both unskilled as well as...

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 specific factors model, in which...

This paper analyzes wage assimilation of ethnic German immigrants to Germany. We use unique administrative data that include a standardized measure of immigrants' pre-migration wage based on occupation, industry, tenure, qualification, and the German wage structure. We find that immigrants...

Even though ethnic clustering is common, both economic theory and empirical research have not been able to provide a clear-cut answer on its effects on the integration of immigrants. In this paper, we study the effect of residential clustering on the labour market outcome of immigrants in...