Research
Published or forthcoming
Earnings assimilation of post-unification East German migrants in West Germany (with Regina T. Riphahn), forthcoming in LABOUR: Review of Labour Economics and Industrial Relations, available here
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We investigate the wage assimilation of East Germans who migrated to West Germany after reunification (1990-1999). We compare their wage assimilation to that of ethnic German immigrants from Eastern Bloc countries and international immigrants to West Germany who arrived at the same time. The analysis uses administrative as well as survey data. The results suggest that East Germans faced significant initial earnings disadvantages in West Germany, even conditional on age and education. However, these disadvantages were smaller than those of international immigrants, supporting the beneficial role of cultural similarity. The earnings gap relative to West German natives narrowed over time for all immigrants. These findings are robust to controlling for potentially endogenous return migration and labor force participation. Controls for fixed effects reveal that positive assimilation for East German and international immigrants was concentrated among highly educated immigrants.
Work in progress
The effects of EU visa liberalization on immigrant selection in the German labor market (with Philipp Jaschke)
In this paper, we examine the effects on immigrant skill selection of a visa liberalization policy that was originally tailored towards short-term stays. From 2009 on, as part of the EU visa liberalization legislature, Germany has introduced a bilateral visa-free movement with a number of non-EU countries from Eastern Europe. Although there has been a substantial rise in arrival numbers to Germany after the reform, we know little about the indirect effects of such policies in terms of skills selection in the source country's labor market. In our empirical analysis, we treat visa liberalization as a quasi-experiment and visa-free movement as a means to reduce migration costs. Our study is among the first to exploit within-origin-country variation in migration costs. The results suggest that the policy has a positive effect on skills selection. However, immigrants without university degrees benefit the most in entry wages. This sparks a discussion on the existence of possible bias when examining skills selection based on education.
Migrant motherhood penalty in Germany
In this paper, I examine the heterogeneities in the motherhood penalty (MHP) in Germany based on mothers' cultural origins. I compare immigrant mothers' labor market outcomes and reaction to a family allowance policy to those of native mothers. The main findings suggest that the outcomes between the groups diverge after the first year after childbirth. Foreigners return on average later than the natives to the labor market. In the long run, natives have the smallest motherhood penalty. The results from the analysis of the effects of the introduction of a family allowance policy on the return to employment suggest that foreigners from predominantly Muslim countries that are in the lowest part of earnings distribution react negatively to the child allowance policy dependent on their pre-childbirth earnings compared to the natives.