Professional networks and the labour market assimilation of immigrants

Mattias Engdahl (), Sébastien Willis () and Olof Åslund ()
Additional contact information
Mattias Engdahl: IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy, Postal: Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy, P O Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden
Sébastien Willis: Uppsala University and Uppsala Center for Labor Studies
Olof Åslund: Uppsala University, IFAU, UCLS, CReAM, IZA.

No 2024:9, Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy

Abstract: We study how professional networks are related to immigrant labour market integration. Matched employer-employee data for Sweden show that networks grow with time in the host country and that their composition changes from immigrant toward native network members. A firm-dyadic analysis of re-employment of displaced workers suggests that conational connections have a much larger positive effect than native connections. However, the employment effect of native connections grows with years since migration. Furthermore, native connections tend to be associated with higher earnings and increased hires in connected local industries. After 20 years in Sweden, the built-up connections raise immigrant re-employment rates by 0.7 to 1.1 percentage points, amounting to 10–20 percent of the observed difference by years since migration. Our findings indicate complete assimilation in the total productivity of professional connections for displaced workers.

Keywords: labour market integration of immigrants; networks; job search (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 J20 J60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2024-03-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab, nep-mig, nep-net, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifau.se/globalassets/pdf/se/2024/wp-20 ... he-labour-market.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:ifauwp:2024_009

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy IFAU, P O Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ali Ghooloo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).