Workplace segregation and the labour market performance of immigrants

Segregation of immigrants across workplaces has been widely documented, however the consequences of such segregation remain subject to conjecture. This project study the effect of the conational share in an immigrant’s first job on subsequent labour market outcomes using both large-scale administrative data, instrumenting for the conational share using hiring trends in the local labour market, and small-scale survey data, which contain detailed information on migrants' pre-migration characteristics and how they found their first job.

A ten percentage-point increase in the initial cognitional share is found to lower subsequent employment rates by 1.4–2.5 percentage points, depending on the sample and estimation strategy. Differences in human capital acquisition do not appear to explain the employment effect, while there is some evidence that it is explained by differences in the quality of social network and subsequent job search behaviour induced by differences in the initial workplace.

Researcher

Sébastien Willis