Essays on migration and labor economics

This dissertation consists of three empirical essays on migration and labor economics, with a particular focus on the evaluation of policy interventions in Germany. The three essays analyze three reforms and their effects on immigrants and establishments on the labor market. The first two essays investigate the effect of policy instruments on immigrant integration in Germany. The policy instruments under consideration are naturalization and voting rights acquisition in Germany. The third study analyzes the impact of dismissal protection regulations on small German establishments. The first study investigates the causal impact of naturalization on the labor market outcomes of immigrants in Germany. The study includes 3 different outcome groups: indicators of labor market access, outcomes describing success on the labor market and measures of investment in host-country specific human capital. The analysis focuses on two reforms of German citizenship laws in 1991 and 2000, which introduced and changed minimum residency duration requirements for German citizenship eligibility. The study exploits the exogenous variation generated by these two reforms in naturalization regulations and applies an instrumental variable estimation strategy. It uses a novel dataset collected by the Institute of Employment Research (IAB) in cooperation with the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), the IAB-SOEP Migration sample. This dataset provides detailed information on recent immigrants and their migration biographies, which allows a precise calculation of eligibility for citizenship. The estimation sample consists of first-generation immigrants born abroad, aged 17-65, and who had not obtained German citizenship at birth. After taking into account the potential endogeneity of naturalization, the findings reveal that male immigrants' labor market outcomes do not benefit significantly from naturalization. In contrast, naturalization decreases the risks of unemployment and welfare dependence and increases employment stability for female immigrants. The second study analyzes the causal effects of non-citizen voting rights in municipal elections on the integration of EU immigrants in Germany. The analysis considers the following outcomes as measures for immigrant integration: subjective well-being, German language skills, the intention to stay in Germany permanently and identifying as a German. The analysis exploits a late-1995 extension of voting rights in German municipal elections to non-German European Union citizens residing in Germany to identify a causal effect of voting rights. The study applies difference-in-differences techniques using this reform as a source of exogenous variation in voting eligibility. Greek and Italian immigrants who acquire municipal voting rights serve as the treatment group, while the control group consists of Turkish immigrants. Using a representative longitudinal survey dataset, the German SOEP, the findings suggest that there is no significant effect of extending municipal voting rights to EU immigrants on any of the analyzed integration outcomes. The final study examines the causal effects of relaxed dismissal protection on worker flows and hire quality in small establishments in Germany. To identify the causal effects of dismissal protection regulations, the study exploits a change in German dismissal protection law in 2004, which raised the establishment size threshold from more than five to more than 10 full-time equivalent (FTE) workers. This reform serves as a source of exogenous variation in dismissal protection coverage in a difference-in-differences estimation framework. While the treatment group consists of establishments with 5.75 to 9.25 FTE workers, establishments with 10.75 to 20 FTE employees form the control group. The worker flow outcomes include the number of hirings and separations within a given year, and the respective hiring and separation rates. Using the unique linked employer-employee administrative data provided by the IAB, I find a positive significant effect on both hirings and separations in establishments. The increase in separations is smaller in magnitude and associated with a time lag. Incumbent workers maintaining their protections after the reform could explain this. In contrast, I do not find any effects of relaxed dismissal protection on the minimum or the spread of hire quality.