Language Roulette : The Effect of Random Placement on Refugees' Labour Market Integration

The labour market integration of refugees represents a key challenge for policy makers and has emerged as one of the most divisive topics in public debate. European countries have been pressured to establish fair and transparent methods of placing asylum seekers among the European states and into different regions within their national borders. In this paper, I highlight the unsurprising yet unintended consequences of following the most neutral placement mechanism: random assignment. The natural experiment of placing refugees randomly across different language regions in Switzerland results in substantially higher probabilities of finding employment when asylum seekers are placed in regions with a lingua franca that matches their individual language skills than when they are placed in regions speaking unfamiliar languages. Additionally, the findings suggest that language course participation can offset the reduced likelihood of employment in cases of a language mismatch. While random placement of refugees may be desirable for political reasons, it is detrimental to the economic integration process of these immigrants. Due to its strong subnational entities and clearly defined borders of language regions, Switzerland can function as a laboratory for European policy. This study also provides new empirical evidence for a positive and significant language proficiency effect

Brexit, collective uncertainty and migration decisions

Brexit - the United Kingdom leaving the European Union - continues to create an unpredictable social and political landscape. Uncertainty and perceptions are influential drivers when it comes to migration decisions, and yet, the literature's inference typically relies on individual-level data. This leaves the possibility of unobserved confounding factors being simultaneously associated with uncertainty perceptions. We leverage the British referendum of 2016 to leave the European Union as a unique natural experiment to demonstrate how collective uncertainty, induced by national government policy, affects the migratory behaviour of the citizens of an entire nation. Using official bilateral migration statistics, we highlight a substantial increase in migration flows from the UK to the remaining EU/EFTA countries. Exceptional spikes in naturalisation figures further indicate that UK-immigrants already living in other EU member states are actively taking decisions to mitigate the negative impact Brexit can have on their lives and livelihoods. We analyse encompassing interview data conducted among UK-immigrants in Germany to show that uncertainty about future bilateral relations and concerns about a negative economic outlook and social consequences in the UK, have been by far the most important driver of migration and naturalisation decisions in the post-referendum period

Corruption and the Desire to Leave Quasi-Experimental Evidence on Corruption as a Driver of Emigration Intentions

Whether and to what extent corruption drives emigration has received growing attention in the literature in recent years, yet the nature of the relationship remains unclear. To test causal claims, we rely on representative global survey data of more than 280,000 respondents across 67 countries from 2010 to 2014. We use two different measures of emigration intentions and individual, as well as country-level measures of corruption, and propose to instrument the endogenous presence of corruption in a country with the prevalence of cashless transactions in the economy to correct for potential estimation bias. We find robust support for the hypothesis that corruption increases emigration intentions across countries. The effect, however, is likely to be underestimated in conventional models that do not account for endogeneity. The results highlight the need to look beyond purely economic, social, security-related, and environmental drivers when assessing the root causes of migration

It's Discrimination, Stupid : Labour Market (Re-) Entry Difficulties among Different Immigrant Groups in Switzerland

We start from the empirical observation that unemployed migrants from Africa and Ex-Yugoslavia have more difficulties when trying to re-enter the labour market as compared to migrants from Portugal. Based on a unique dataset of newly unemployed individuals in the Swiss Canton of Vaud, we set out to analyse the reasons for the large difference in the length of unemployment spells by testing the most important theoretical approaches of employability proposed in the literature. First, we analyse whether differences at the level of individual resources explain differences in outcome (human capital). Second, we test how the size of the social network influences the likelihood of finding employment (social capital). Third, we account for motivation, effort and job search strategies (proactive search behaviour). Eventually, we controlled for individual wellbeing as a potential driver of unemployment duration but we found no evidence that these different factors are able to explain the underperformance of Ex-Yugoslavian and African respondents. Our conclusion is that discriminatory patterns related to nationality are at least in part responsible for the substantial disadvantage of these groups and we explain it by referring to the diffusion of negative stereotypes about specific immigrant communities in the public sphere

Diplomats or Defendants? Defining the Future of Head-of-State Immunity

Fluorescence nanoscopy provides means to discernthe finer details of protein localization and interaction in cells by offeringan order of magnitude higher resolution than conventional optical imagingtechniques. However, these super resolution techniques put higher demands onthe optical system as well as on the fluorescent probes, making multicolorfluorescence nanoscopy a challenging task. Here we present a new and simpleprocedure which exploits the photostability and excitation spectra of dyes toincrease the number of simultaneous recordable targets in STED nanoscopy. Weuse this procedure to demonstrate four color STED imaging of platelets with ≤40 nm resolution and low crosstalk. Platelets can selectively store, sequesterand release a multitude of different proteins, and in a manner specific fordifferent physiological and disease states. By applying multicolor nanoscopy tostudy platelets, we can achieve spatial mapping of the protein organizationwith a high resolution, for multiple proteins at the same time and in the samecell. This provides a means to identify specific platelet activation states fordiagnostic purposes and to understand the underlying protein storage andrelease mechanisms. We studied the organization of the pro- and anti-angiogenicproteins VEGF and PF-4 together with fibrinogen and filamentous actin, andfound distinct features in their respective protein localization. Further,colocalization analysis revealed only minor overlap between the proteins VEGFand PF-4 indicating that they have separate storage and release mechanisms,corresponding well with their opposite rules as pro- and anti-angiogenicproteins, respectively.Updated from "Submitted" to "Published". QC 20140630</p

Drivers of Immigrant Employment in Switzerland

In modern societies, labour market participation is considered essential for immigrants to be regarded as "integrated". Moreover, paid work generally increases societal participation and reduces welfare dependency. Hence, it is in the interest of both, immigrants and the host country society, to ensure a high level of labour-market integration. This thesis argues that immigrants' labour market disadvantage can be explained by four different drivers. First, differences in existing human and social capital can determine labour market success relative to natives. Second, a host-country's society's attitudes towards immigrants can affect their labour market success. According to this concept of discrimination, (residual) differences in labour market outcomes are explained by differential behaviour of a majority population towards its in-group peers vis-à-vis the immigrant out-group. Third, integration policies can affect individual human capital endowment and consequently alter the skill composition of immigrants relative to natives. Fourth, policies can also affect how immigrants are enabled to applying their existing skills. That is, such immigration-policy effects do not change individual skill composition but affect how these skills can be used in the host-country labour market, for instance, through recognition of educational attainment. We are able to combine survey-based analyses and residual approaches with experimental research and show that discrimination continues to be a plausible explanation for differences in labour-market outcomes between natives and immigrants. Our research further demonstrates that enhancing immigrants' human capital can turn out to be a powerful tool to mitigate differences in labour market outcomes, even among the most vulnerable groups such as asylum seekers. In fact, we provide evidence that active labour market measures are more beneficial for immigrants than for natives. On the other hand, we have shown that the effects of integration and immigration policies currently in place in Switzerland are often detrimental for immigrants' skill acquisition as well as skill utilisation, thereby hampering immigrants' labour market integration instead of promoting it. For activation measures, for instance, we show that migrants are overrepresented in programmes with little efficacy. We infer that if political and societal goals do not prioritise immigrants' integration, self-reinforcing patterns of discrimination can easily occur. Contemporary policy-making should therefore focus on counteracting for statistical discrimination, in order to lay the groundwork for fighting taste-based discrimination, a challenge that goes beyond short-term labour-market policies

Brexit, uncertainty, and migration decisions

We leverage the British Brexit referendum decision to leave the European Union, to demonstrate how changes in uncertainty about a country's future socio-political condition can impact migratory behaviour. Using official bilateral migration statistics, we report an excess increase in migration from the UK to the EU of approximately 16% post-referendum, compared to movements between the remaining EU countries over the same period. In addition, we analyse in-depth interviews conducted with UK migrants in Germany to show that uncertainty about future bilateral relations, a negative economic outlook, and perceptions of negative social consequences in the UK have been by far the most dominant drivers of migration in the post-referendum period. We further corroborate the effect of changes in uncertainty on migration-related behaviour with exceptional spikes in naturalisations, indicating that UK citizens living in other EU member states are actively taking decisions to mitigate the negative impact that Brexit is having on their livelihoods

Conformal Prediction for Time Series with Modern Hopfield Networks

To quantify uncertainty, conformal prediction methods are gaining continuously more interest and have already been successfully applied to various domains. However, they are difficult to apply to time series as the autocorrelative structure of time series violates basic assumptions required by conformal prediction. We propose HopCPT, a novel conformal prediction approach for time series that not only copes with temporal structures but leverages them. We show that our approach is theoretically well justified for time series where temporal dependencies are present. In experiments, we demonstrate that our new approach outperforms state-of-the-art conformal prediction methods on multiple real-world time series datasets from four different domains.Comment: presented at NeurIPS 202