| dc.description.abstract | This paper analyses the differences in labour economic and language outcomes between
refugees and economic immigrants in Germany. We use data from the German Socioeconomic
Panel (GSOEP), a yearly household survey of the population of Germany. Analysing
the period from 1994 to 2014, we study only immigrants working at the time of survey.
We find that working refugees, on average, earn between 17.6 and 19.2 percent less than
working economic immigrants in Germany. The reasons for this are that refugees work
on average 10.9 percent less hours annually and earn 8.3 percent (though not a significant
result) less hourly wages, than their counterparts.
We further set out to explore how important language proficiency is for the annual earnings
of these two distinct groups of working immigrants. We find that for both groups,
being classified as “Good” or “Very Good” in spoken German improves their earnings on
average by around 11.9 percent. In addition, working refugees are not more likely to speak
German well, or improve their language proficiency at a faster rate, compared to working
economic immigrants. Our main models of choice use the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS)
estimation method with robust standard errors. | nb_NO |
