Real Exchange Rates and the Earnings of Immigrants

Christian Dustmann, Hyejin Ku and Tetyana Surovtseva ()

The Economic Journal, 2023, vol. 134, issue 657, 271-294

Abstract: We relate origin-destination real price differences to immigrants’ reservation wages and their career trajectories, exploiting administrative data from Germany and the 2004 enlargement of the European Union. We find that immigrants who enter Germany when a unit of earnings from Germany allows for larger consumption at home settle for lower entry wages, but subsequently catch up to those arriving with less favourable exchange rates, through transition to better-paying occupations and firms. Similar patterns hold in the United States data. Our analysis offers one explanation for the widespread phenomenon of immigrants’ downgrading, with new implications for immigrant cohort effects and assimilation profiles.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ej/uead066 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Journal Article: Real Exchange Rates and the Earnings of Immigrants (2024)
Working Paper: Real Exchange Rates and the Earnings of Immigrants (2023)
Working Paper: Real Exchange Rates and the Earnings of Immigrants (2023)
Working Paper: Real Exchange Rates and the Earnings of Immigrants (2021)
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:oup:econjl:v:134:y:2023:i:657:p:271-294.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Economic Journal is currently edited by Francesco Lippi

More articles in The Economic Journal from Royal Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press () and ().