Research

Labour Market Conditions at Arrival and the Integration of Migrants

María Gertrudis Fernández

In this paper, I study how conditions of the labour market at arrival affect the subsequent economic success of migrants and refugees. To do so, I use several rounds of the UK Labour Force Survey covering immigrants arrived in the UK between 2001 and 2016. In the empirical strategy, I exploit the quasi-random allocation of asylum seekers due to the Dispersal Policy effective since 2001. Because refugee status is not reported in the UKLFS, I identify it by combining information on their country of origin and year of arrival with yearly acceptance rates by origin country provided by the UK Home Office. For refugees, I estimated that a high unemployment rate at arrival is associated with lower earnings, an effect that lasts up to 3-4 years after arrival. In particular, refugees experience up to a 10% decrease in earnings for each percentage point increase in the unemployment rate at arrival.

Draft available upon request

Work in Progress

  • Minimum Wages and Migrants' Labor Market Outcomes
  • Joint with Katia Gallegos

  • Presence of Migrants and Voting Behaviour of Natives in Spain

    Joint with Jesús Fernández-Huertas and Luigi Minale