It is widely debated whether immigrants who live among co-ethnics are less willing to integrate into the host society. Exploiting the quasi-experimental guest worker placement across German regions during the 1960/70s as well as information on immigrants' inter-ethnic contact networks and social...

In this note, we show that labour market integration can be a double-edged sword. In the presence of local human capital externalities, integration and the ensuing agglomeration of skilled labour can cause a decline in human capital and the total wage sum (net of education costs). In particular,...

Does a high regional concentration of immigrants of the same ethnicity affect immigrant children's acquisition of host-country language skills and educational attainment? We exploit the exogenous placement of guest workers from five ethnicities across German regions during the 1960s and 1970s in...

This paper investigates the economic returns to language skills and bilingualism. The analysis is staged in Kazakhstan, a multi-ethnic country with complex ethnic settlement patterns that has switched its official state language from Russian to Kazakh. Using two newly assembled data sets, we...

We analyze an immigration reform in Denmark that tightened refugee immigrants' eligibility criteria for permanent residency to incentivize their labor market attachment and acquisition of local language skills. Contrary to what the reform intended, the overall employment of those affected...

This paper develops and estimates a dynamic model where individuals differ in ability and location preference to evaluate the mechanisms that affect the evolution of immigrants' careers in conjunction with their re-migration plans. Our analysis highlights a novel form of selective return...

The role of ethnic clustering in ethnic identity formation has remained unexplored, mainly due to missing detailed data. This study closes the knowledge gap for Germany by employing a unique combination of datasets, the survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and disaggregated...

Recent European legislation on immigration has revealed a particular paradox on migration policies. On the one hand, the trend of recent legislation points to the increasing closure of frontiers (OECD 1999, 2001,2004), trying to limit the immigrants' stock. On the other hand, there is an...

We investigate whether time-persistent cultural borders impede economic exchange across regions of the same country. To measure cultural differences we evaluate, for the first time in economics, linguistic micro-data about phonological and grammatical features of German dialects. These data are...

We examine the impact of language training on the economic integration of immigrants in France. The assignment to this training, offered by the French Ministry of the Interior, depends mainly on a precise rule: the training is available when the test score of an initial language exam is below a...