Does Certifying Foreign Qualifications Lead to Better Immigrant Skills Utilization?

Marco Pecoraro and Max Tani

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2023, vol. 170, issue 1, No 15, 322 pages

Abstract: Abstract Using a novel panel dataset on recent immigrants in Switzerland, we study the relationship between the degree of skills utilization, the foreign-acquired education and its certification in the host country. We find that the relationship with foreign education is negative, especially when acquired in a non-EU country, in line with the literature documenting the imperfect international transferability of human capital. Obtaining a “Certificate of Equivalence” in Switzerland makes this relationship statistically non-significant: in other words, the certification enables immigrants to enjoy the same degree of skills utilization in the Swiss labour market as those with Swiss education. Additional results suggest that immigrants with a foreign but not Swiss-certified education keep the degree of skill utilization as high as it would be if they were Swiss educated when they obtain a job contract or job offer before migrating to Switzerland. These findings are robust to controlling for self-selection on unobserved characteristics.

Keywords: Immigration; Qualifications; Recognition; Skills utilization; Labour market (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 J24 J44 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1007/s11205-023-03069-x

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