Who Suffers the Greatest Loss? Costs of Job Displacement for Migrants and Natives

We are the first to provide empirical evidence on differences in the individual costs of job loss for migrants compared to natives in Germany. Using linked employer-employee data for the period 1996-2017, we compute each displaced worker's earnings, wage, and employment loss after a mass layoff in comparison to a matched, nondisplaced, control worker. We find that migrants face substantially higher earnings losses than natives due to both higher wage and employment losses. Differences in individual characteristics and differential sorting across industries and occupations can fully explain the gap in wage losses but not the employment gap after displacement. Laid-off migrants are both less likely to become reemployed and work fewer days than laid-off natives. In terms of channels, we show that i) migrants sort into worse establishments and ii) migrants' slightly lower geographic mobility across federal states may explain part of their lower re-employment success; iii) our results suggest that competition from other migrants, rather than natives, negatively contributes to migrants' costs of job loss.