EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Real Exchange Rates and the Earnings of Immigrants

Christian Dustmann, Hyejin Ku and Tetyana Surovtseva (tsurovtseva@ub.edu)
Additional contact information
Tetyana Surovtseva: University of Barcelona

No 16390, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

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 US data. Our analysis offers one explanation for the widespread phenomenon of immigrants' downgrading, with new implications for immigrant cohort effects and assimilation profiles.

Keywords: immigrant downgrading; reservation wage; real exchange rate; earnings assimilation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 J31 J61 O15 O24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 60 pages
Date: 2023-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-int, nep-lab, nep-opm and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: Economic Journal, 2024, 134 (657), 171 - 294

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp16390.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Real Exchange Rates and the Earnings of Immigrants (2024) Downloads
Journal Article: Real Exchange Rates and the Earnings of Immigrants (2023) Downloads
Working Paper: Real Exchange Rates and the Earnings of Immigrants (2023) Downloads
Working Paper: Real Exchange Rates and the Earnings of Immigrants (2021) Downloads
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:dp16390

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

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 (hinte@iza.org).

 
Page updated 2025-01-17
Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp16390