The Share of Foreigners in One's Occupation and Attitudes towards Foreigners

Marco Pecoraro and Didier Ruedin

No 17-06, IRENE Working Papers from IRENE Institute of Economic Research

Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between attitudes towards foreigners and the share of foreigners at the occupational level. Using a question on equal opportunities for foreigners from the Swiss House-hold Panel, ordered probit regressions with standard controls show that: (a) there is a negative association between the share of foreigners in one's occupation and positive attitudes towards foreigners; (b) there is a positive association between the share of recently arrived foreigners and positives attitudes towards foreigners. This suggests that workers are at the same time wary of competition with foreigners, and welcome their contribution to overcome labour shortages. Adding the occupational unemployment rate to the model indicates that objective competition may be as relevant as perceptions of competition. Controlling for other occupational characteristics establishes that the associations in (a) and (b) are probably caused by sorting on job quality. All results are robust to the potential endogeneity of the share of foreigners at the occupational level.

Keywords: Immigration; attitudes towards foreigners; labour market; occupational classification; ethnic concentration; unemployment; instrumental variables (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J24 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages.
Date: 2017-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-mig and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www5.unine.ch/RePEc/ftp/irn/pdfs/WP17-06.pdf (application/pdf)

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:irn:wpaper:17-06

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IRENE Working Papers from IRENE Institute of Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Siwar Khelifa ().