Immigrant skills and employment. Cross-country evidence from the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey

Bernt Bratsberg (), Torbjørn Hægeland and Oddbjørn Raaum

Discussion Papers from Statistics Norway, Research Department

Abstract: This paper studies the distributions of literacy skills, education, and employment of immigrants and natives in three host countries: Canada, the United States, and Norway. For natives, we uncover remarkably stable relations between literacy skills, schooling, and employment across countries. For immigrants, the relations differ strongly: whereas literacy skills form only a weak determinant of immigrant employment in the North American labor markets, in Norway literacy is much more important for immigrant than native employment. We investigate various sources of this discrepancy and fail to uncover evidence that the finding reflects differential immigrant sorting across host countries. Instead, results show that literacy skills are particularly important for groups characterized by low employment in the Norwegian labor market, consistent with the hypothesis that a compressed wage structure, employment protection, and social insurance with high replacement ratios create adverse employment effects for immigrants.

Keywords: Immigrants; literacy skills; employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 J24 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ssb.no/a/publikasjoner/pdf/DP/dp730.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:ssb:dispap:730

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Statistics Norway, Research Department P.O.Box 8131 Dep, N-0033 Oslo, Norway. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by L Maasø ().