Skill Downgrading among Refugees and Economic Immigrants in Germany: Evidence from the Syrian Refugee Crisis

Plamen Nikolov (), Leila Salarpour Goodarzi () and David Titus ()
Additional contact information
Plamen Nikolov: Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science
Leila Salarpour Goodarzi: Binghamton University, New York
David Titus: University of Victoria

No 15426, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Upon arrival to a new country, many immigrants face job downgrading, a phenomenon describing workers being in jobs far below where they would be assigned based on their skills. Downgrading leads to immigrants receiving lower returns to the same skills than natives. The level of downgrading could depend on the type of immigrant and numerous factors. This study examines the determinants of skill downgrading among two types of immigrants – refugees and economic immigrants – in the German labor markets between 1984 and 2018. We find that refugees downgrade more than economic immigrants, and this discrepancy between the two groups persists over time. We show that language skill improvements exert a strong influence on subsequent labor market outcomes of both groups.

Keywords: downgrading; immigrants; refugees; Germany; labor markets; wages; employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J11 J15 J61 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2022-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp15426.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:iza:izadps:dp15426

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().