Prior host-country work experience and immigrant labor market outcomes: evidence from Canada

Manish Pandey and James Townsend

IZA Journal of Migration and Development, 2017, vol. 6, issue 1, 1-22

Abstract: Abstract Recent changes to immigration selection policies favor skilled workers with prior work experience in the immigrant host country. Using unique administrative tax data for Canada, we estimate earnings equations to quantify the difference in earnings of immigrants with prior Canadian experience (prefilers) and those without prior experience (non-prefilers). We find that, relative to non-prefilers, entry earnings are higher for prefilers and, for male immigrants, this earnings advantage persists for at least 20 years after arrival. We show that the primary source of the higher entry earnings of prefilers is a higher return to foreign experience. In addition, the prefiler earnings advantage is largest for university graduates and the return to foreign experience is higher for prefilers from Western countries than those from the rest of the world. Our findings suggest that a move towards an immigrant selection system which uses previous host-country work experience as a criterion will improve the labor market performance of immigrants.

Keywords: Immigrant selection; Earnings; Foreign experience returns; Canada (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1186/s40176-016-0075-x Abstract (text/html)

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:spr:izamig:v:6:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1186_s40176-016-0075-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/40176

DOI: 10.1186/s40176-016-0075-x

Access Statistics for this article

IZA Journal of Migration and Development is currently edited by Amelie F. Constant, Denis Fougère and Tommaso Colussi

More articles in IZA Journal of Migration and Development from Springer, Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().