|
The dynamics of ethnic segregation in the German labour market
Submitted
This paper uses administrative data on German firms to empirically study the
dynamics of workplace segregation between 1975 and 2019. Building on the literature
on neighbourhood segregation, the analysis tests for the presence of tipping points in
the composition by nativity of firms. The evidence of tipping points is limited, and is
strongest for firms in relatively low-skill sectors, including Manufacturing or Hotels
and restaurants, and during years of high immigrant inflows, particularly 1990–1995
and 2013–2018. Furthermore, descriptive evidence shows that segregation in a given
cohort of firms generally declines over time, only increasing when there is a large
immigrant inflow. These findings suggest that the preferences of workers over the
composition of their workplaces are not likely to be the main cause of observed
workplace segregation.
|
|
Workplace segregation and the labour market performance of immigrants
CESifo Working Paper No. 9895, submitted
This paper studies the effect of conational coworkers in an immigrant’s first job
on subsequent labour market outcomes using German register data. I instrument for
the conational share using hiring trends in the local labour market and find that a
ten-percentage-point increase in the initial conational share lowers employment rates
by 3.2 percentage points in the long term, an effect not observed for non-conational
immigrants, with no effect on wages in the long term, conditional on employment.
Descriptive evidence suggests that the employment effect is due both to differential
host country-specific human capital accumulation, as well as changes in job search
behaviour induced by denser conational networks.
|
