Earnings Assimilation of Post-Reunification East German Migrants in West Germany
Regina Riphahn and
Irakli Sauer
No 11233, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo
Abstract:
We investigate the wage assimilation of East Germans who migrated to West Germany after reunification (1990-1999). We compare their wage assimilation to that of ethnic German immigrants from Eastern Bloc countries and international immigrants to West Germany who arrived at the same time. The analysis uses administrative as well as survey data. The results suggest that East Germans faced significant initial earnings disadvantages in West Germany, even conditional on age and education. However, these disadvantages were smaller than those of international immigrants, supporting the beneficial role of cultural similarity. The earnings gap relative to West German natives narrowed over time for all immigrants. These findings are robust to controlling for potentially endogenous return migration and labor force participation. Controls for fixed effects reveal that positive assimilation for East German and international immigrants was concentrated among highly educated immigrants.
Keywords: migration; earnings assimilation; internal migration; labor market integration; cultural similarity; Germany; reunification (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F15 J31 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-his, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11233.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: Earnings Assimilation of Post-reunification East German Migrants in West Germany (2024) 
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:ces:ceswps:_11233
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().