Seeking similarity: How immigrants and natives manage at the labor market

We show that immigrant managers are substantially more likely to hire immigrants than are native managers. The finding holds when comparing establishments in the same 5-digit industry and location, when comparing different establishments within the same firm, when analyzing establishments that change management over time, and when accounting for within- establishment trends in recruitment patterns. The effects are largest for small and owner-managed establishments in the for-profit sector. Separations are more frequent when workers and managers have dissimilar origin, but only before workers become protected by EPL. We also find that native managers are unbiased in their recruitments of former coworkers, suggesting that information deficiencies are important. We find no effects on entry wages. Our findings suggest that a low frequency of immigrant managers may contribute to the observed disadvantages of immigrant workers.Minority workers, Labor mobility, Workplace segregation

How does the age structure affect regional productivity?

The article studies the effects of a changing age structure on regional productivity using lagged population structure to purge estimates of the influence of endogenous migration. It is shown that workers aged 50-60 years have a positive effect on regional productivity. Together with evidence from previous research showing that the effect of the same age group on unemployment is positive, the results support the notion that well-matched workers gives rise to both high productivity and high unemployment.

Will I See You at Work? Ethnic Workplace Segregation in Sweden, 1985-2002

We present evidence of substantial and increasing ethnic workplace segregation using linked employer-employee data covering the entire working-age Swedish population between 1985 and 2002. The analysis accounts for potential across-group differences in the distribution of human capital, geography and industrial allocation. Immigrants are particularly overexposed to workers from their own birth region but also to other immigrants. The degree and nature of segregation varies substantially across ethnic groups, and the patterns are quite persistent over time. There is ethnic sorting also among well-established groups, but segregation is generally negatively correlated with economic status. Groups with low employment rates are more segregated from natives, individuals with many immigrant colleagues earn less, and segregation is countercyclical at the local level. These observations all support the idea that the labor market is ethnically segmented

The Duration of Paid Parental Leave and Children's Scholastic Performance

We study how the duration of paid parental leave affects the accumulation of cognitive skills among children. Using a reform which extended parental leave benefits from 12 to 15 months for Swedish children born after August 1988 we evaluate the effects of prolonged parental leave on children's test scores and grades at age 16. We show that, on average, the reform had no effect on children's scholastic performance. However, we do find positive effects for children of well-educated mothers, a result that is robust to a number of different specifications. We find no corresponding heterogeneity relative to parental earnings or fathers' education, or relative to other predictors of child performance. We find no effects on intermediate outcomes such as mothers' subsequent earnings, child health, parental fertility, divorce rates, or the mothers' mental health. Overall the results suggest positive causal interaction effects between mothers' education and the amount of time mothers spend with their children. Since the institutional context is one in which the alternative is subsidized day care, the results imply that subsidizing longer parental leave spells rather than day care reinforce the relationship between maternal education and school outcomes.

Seeking similarity: How immigrants and natives manage at the labor market

We show that immigrant managers are substantially more likely to hire immigrants than are native managers. The finding holds when comparing establishments in the same 5-digit industry and location, when comparing different establishments within the same firm, when analyzing establishments that change management over time, and when accounting for within- establishment trends in recruitment patterns. The effects are largest for small and owner-managed establishments in the for-profit sector. Separations are more frequent when workers and managers have dissimilar origin, but only before workers become protected by EPL. We also find that native managers are unbiased in their recruitments of former coworkers, suggesting that information deficiencies are important. We find no effects on entry wages. Our findings suggest that a low frequency of immigrant managers may contribute to the observed disadvantages of immigrant workers

Age at migration and social integration

The paper studies childhood migrants and examines how age at migration affects their ensuing integration at the residential market, the labor market, and the marriage market. We use population-wide Swedish data and compare outcomes as adults among siblings arriving at different ages in order to ensure that the results can be given a causal interpretation. The results show that the children who arrived at a higher age had substantially lower shares of natives among their neighbors, coworkers and spouses as adults. The effects are mostly driven by higher exposure to immigrants of similar ethnic origin, in particular at the marriage market. There are also non-trivial effects on employment, but a more limited impact on education and wages. We also analyze children of migrants and show that parents' time in the host country before child birth matters, which implies that the outcomes of the social integration process are inherited. Inherited integration has a particularly strong impact on the marriage patterns of females