Résultat de la recherche
Does Certifying Foreign Qualifications Lead to Better Immigrant Skills Utilization?
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.
Does Educational Mismatch Affect Emigration Behaviour?
This paper uses linked Swiss administrative and survey data to examine the relationship between educational mismatch in the labour market and emigration decisions, carrying out the analysis for both Swiss native and previous immigrant workers. In turn, migrants' decisions separate returning home from onward migration to a third country. We find that undereducation is positively associated with the probability of emigration and return to the country of origin. In contrast, the reverse relationship is found between overeducation and emigration, especially among non-European immigrant workers. According to the predictions of the traditional model of migration, based on self-selection, migrants returning home are positively selected relative to migrants emigrating to other countries. We also find that immigrants from a country outside the EU27/EFTA have little incentive to return home and generally accept jobs for which they are mismatched in Switzerland. These results highlight the relevance to understand emigration behaviours in relation to the type of migrant that is most integrated, and productive, in the Swiss market, hence enabling better migration and domestic labour market policy design.
Modification de la loi fédérale sur les étrangers et l’intégration : restriction des voyages à l’étranger et modification du statut de l’admission provisoire. Prise de position scientifique
A Foreigner Who Doesn’t Steal My Job: The Role of Unemployment Risk and Values in Attitudes towards Equal Opportunities
Immigration has become systematically politicized and opposed by many individuals. We examine individual attitudes towards equal opportunities for foreigners and Swiss citizens, using cross-sectional data from the Swiss Household Panel. Individuals with low levels of education tend to oppose foreigners, while the opposition by individuals with high levels of education increases with the risk of unemployment. Values and beliefs explain the negative attitudes of individuals with low levels of education, but not the association with the risk of unemployment for individuals with high levels of education. Clearly, both values and economic factors are important for explaining attitudes towards foreigners.
How effective are integration policy reforms? The case of asylum-related migrants.
The marked increase of asylum seekers arriving in Western Europe after 2014 has renewed debates on policy measures that countries should put into place to support their integration. Although implemented by many countries in recent years, research has neglected the effect of integration policy reform packages combining economic and social policy measures on asylum-related immigrants' adjustment processes. Exploiting a comprehensive integration policy reform in Switzerland, using survey data from the Health Monitoring of the Swiss Migrant Population, and registering data on the whole asylum-related population, our difference-in-differences analyses reveal that provisionally admitted individuals benefiting from the reform have higher employment probability, increased income levels, better language skills, and feel less lonely or without a homeland relative to comparable asylum seekers who did not benefit from the reform. Robustness checks assessing common pre-reform trends support our findings, which highlight the importance of evaluating entire reform packages when assessing integration policies' effectiveness.