Search Results

This paper studies whether assessing foreign education with its host country equivalent, as practised in Australia, raises migrants' returns to schooling. Using unawareness between degrees obtained abroad versus Australia as instrument for undertaking the assessment, I find substantial wage improvements when foreign qualifications are assessed in both cross-sectional and panel estimations. This result is not solely attributable to selection, as this would imply an unrealistic shift in the distribution of unobserved characteristics among assessed and not-assessed migrants. Adding a local signal to foreign education emerges as effective policy to improve the transferability of human capital and migrants' economic assimilation.

Published abstract reprinted by permission of the copyright owner. Show less

This working paper examines whether migration policy, in addition to managing a country's population size, is a suitable tool to influence immigrants' labour market outcomes. It exploits a migration policy change that occurred in Australia in the late 1990s and data collected by the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia. The statistical techniques employed in the empirical analysis consistently reveal that the policy change has no detectable impact on the employment rate, wages, over-education, occupational downgrading, and self-reported use of skills for male immigrants, who account for about 75 per cent of the sample, while they have a modest short-term positive impact on female immigrants. These results support the view that migration policy is an ineffective policy tool to influence migrants' labour market outcomes. However, the economic relevance of making an effective use of migrants' skills provides scope for close coordination between immigration and employment policy to ensure that efforts in attracting foreign talent are not dissipated by labour market frictions and other inefficiencies.

Published abstract. Show less

The cause of immigrant education mismatch in the host country labour market might not necessarily be discrimination or imperfect transferability of human capital, as argued in previous studies. Immigrants who have gained professional experience in the home country in jobs below their education level might be assessed by host country employers as having lower abilities and skills than those expected from their educational qualifications. Using the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia we show that a significant part of the variation in the immigrants’ probability to be over-/under-educated in the Australian labour market can be explained by having been over-/under-educated in the last job in the home country.

Published abstract reprinted by permission of the copyright owner. Show less

This article analyses the impact of a change in Australia’s immigration policy, introduced on 1 July 1999, on migrants’ probability of being over or undereducated or correctly matched. The policy change consists of stricter entry requirements about age, language ability, education, and work experience. The results indicate that those who entered under more stringent conditions - the second cohort - have a lower probability of to be overeducated and a correspondingly higher probability of being better matched than those in the first cohort. The policy change appears to have reduced the incidence of overeducation among women, enhanced the relevance of being educated in Australia to being correctly matched, and has attracted a higher proportion of immigrants who were already underutilised (or overachieving) in their home countries. Overall, the policy appears to have brought immigrants that reduced the education mismatch in Australia’s labour market.

Published abstract reprinted by permission of the copyright owner. Show less

We study whether Australian employers recognise immigrants’ education acquired abroad, and if so how. Using data from the Longitudinal Surveys of Immigrants in Australia, we apply interval regression to model migrant hourly earnings. We find substantially higher returns from human capital obtained in Australia and other OECD countries compared with non-OECD countries. These results suggest that the transfer of human capital acquired abroad is mediated by the country in which it was acquired, as found for Israel (Friedberg (2000) and the US (Bratsberg and Ragan (2002)). The results also suggest that immigrants from non-OECD countries are the ones who can gain the most from obtaining further education in Australia, and that targeted rather than generic policies in this area could reduce the extent of the education-occupation mismatch amongst immigrants.

Abstract from IZA website. Show less

Literature on the immigrant labour market mismatch has not explored the signal provided by the quality of home country work experience, particularly that of education-occupation mismatch prior to migration. We show that type of work experience in the home country plays a significant role in explaining immigrant mismatch in the destination country's labour market. We use the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia and find that having been over-educated in the last job held in the home country increases the likelihood of being over-educated in Australia by about 45 per cent. Whereas having been under-educated in the home country has an even stronger impact, as it increases the probability to be similarly mismatched in Australia by 62 per cent.

Published abstract. Show less

This thesis focuses on the impacts of foreign workers on (a) regional skill endowments and (b) native employment levels during the phases of the business cycle. Regional data from Eurostat's Labour Force Survey for the period 1988-1997 are used. These data, which cover 12 member states of the European Union, are unique as they provide internationally comparable statistics across member states. The empirical results show that foreign immigrants in Europe matter. Foreign labour reduces relative differences in regional skill endowments, though this result does not apply to all skill groups. Unskilled and semi-skilled foreign labour promotes 'convergence'. Skilled foreign labour concentrates in regions already better endowed with skilled native workers, raising inter-regional differences in skill endowments. As foreign labour in the European Union is overwhelmingly composed of unskilled workers, regional skill endowments 'converge' in aggregate towards the European average.

Foreign labour cushions the level of native employment over the phases of the economic cycle. Following a labour demand shock, the level of native employment is less affected the higher the share of foreign nationals in the population of the host region. The analysis also shows that European workers initially react to a labour demand shock through changes in the working population and only to a lesser extent through changes in the participation and unemployment rates. This result is similar to those found by the US literature and European studies focusing on individual countries. However it contrasts sharply with the conclusions of Decressin and Fatas (1995) (the most influential Europe-wide based study to date) who, using regional data for the period 1975-1987, find that a labour demand shock is initially mostly absorbed by changes in the participation rate. This contrast (which arises even when the exact regional aggregation of Decressin and Fatas is applied) is interpreted as the result of the different decade studied in this thesis, which is characterised by the removal of international barriers to the free movements of factors and goods within the European Union (Single Act) and the increased economic integration of its member states.

Published abstract. Show less

This paper studies whether skilled migrants contribute to the host country's 'productive efficiency' (Farrell, 1957) using input-output and immigration sectoral data for seven industries in 12 countries during the period 1999-2001. [The authors] find that skilled migrants contribute positively to a country's productive efficiency with the exception of the finance sector. The results broadly support the adoption of skill-biased migration policies.

Published abstract reprinted by permission of the copyright owner. Show less

This paper analyses the role of social capital on immigrants' labour market outcomes. We use the 'principal component analysis' (PCA) to build an index of social networks and explore its impact on the probability of getting a job and on wage levels using the Households Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) longitudinal survey data. We find a positive effect of social capital on migrants' employment outcomes and wages, especially for women. Distinguishing employment into blue and white-collar jobs, we find that social capital only affects the probability of getting a white-collar job. These results suggest that promoting opportunities to create social capital has a beneficial effect on migrants' integration in the host country.

Published abstract. Show less

This paper analyses the impact of a change in Australia's immigration policy, introduced in the mid-1990s, on migrants' probability of becoming entrepreneurs. The policy change consists of stricter entry requirements and restrictions to welfare entitlements. The results indicate that those who entered under more stringent conditions - the second cohort - have a higher probability to become self-employed, than those in the first cohort. We also find significant time and region effects. Contrary to some existing evidence, time spent in Australia positively affects the probability to become self-employed. We discuss intuitions for the results in the paper.

Abstract from publisher's website. Show less