Productivity of refugee workers and implications for innovation and growth

Christopher Baum, Hans Lööf (), Andreas Stephan and Klaus Zimmermann ()

No 485, Working Paper Series in Economics and Institutions of Innovation from Royal Institute of Technology, CESIS - Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies

Abstract: Occupational sorting, classified by the skill-biased technical change theory, ex-plains the largest share of the estimated wage variation of native and refugee im-migrant workers. Refugee workers are less likely to be employed in high-paid jobs and more likely to be sorted into low-skilled jobs than comparable native-born workers. Within most occupations, the differences are small or non-existent. In several STEM occupations, commonly regarded as strategic for innovation-driven economies and in which many companies face difficulties in recruiting personnel, the gap is modest or even reversed. Considering wages as a proxy for produc-tivity, this paper using Swedish register data has implications for innovation and growth in many OECD countries characterized by an aging population and short-ages of skilled workers.

Keywords: Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition; employer-employee data; occupational sorting; productivity; refugee immigrants (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 F22 J24 J60 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2020-06-01, Revised 2022-03-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma, nep-ltv, nep-ore and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://static.sys.kth.se/itm/wp/cesis/cesiswp485.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:cesisp:0485

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series in Economics and Institutions of Innovation from Royal Institute of Technology, CESIS - Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies CESIS - Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies, Royal Institute of Technology, SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vardan Hovsepyan ().