How Middle-Skilled Workers Adjust to Immigration: The Role of Occupational Skill Specificity

Damiano Pregaldini and Uschi Backes-Gellner

No 193, Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW)

Abstract: Our study explores the effects of immigration on the employment of native middle-skilled workers, focusing on how this effect varies with the specificity of their occupational skill bundles. Exploiting the 2002 opening of the Swiss labor market to EU workers and using register data on the location and occupation of these workers, our findings provide novel results on the labor market effects of immigration. We show that the inflow of EU workers led to an increase in the employment of native middle-skilled workers with highly specific occupational skills. This finding could be attributed to immigrant workers reducing existing skill gaps, enhancing the quality of job-worker matches, and alleviating firms' capacity restrictions. This allowed firms to create new jobs, thereby providing increased employment options for middle-skilled workers with highly specialized skills. Previous literature has predominantly highlighted the disadvantages of specific occupational skills compared to general skills in the context of labor market shocks. However, our findings reveal that workers with specific occupational skills can benefit from an immigration-driven labour market shock. These results suggest that policy conclusions regarding the role of specific occupational skills should be more nuanced.

Keywords: migration; cross-border workers; occupational skill specificity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 J24 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2021-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm, nep-int, nep-mig, nep-tid and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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http://repec.business.uzh.ch/RePEc/iso/leadinghouse/0193_lhwpaper.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: How Middle-Skilled Workers Adjust to Immigration: The Role of Occupational Skill Specificity (2023)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iso:educat:0193

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