Augustin de Coulon

Wage Differentials between Ethnic Groups in Switzerland

This paper analyses the average wage differentials between various groups of immigrants and the Swiss workers. Classical OaxacadBlinder decompositions are applied to a sample of 7,494 males (whose 1,070 immigrants) interviewed for the 1995 Swiss Labour Force Survey. Education and experience before and after migration are separately considered in two different ways. We control for sample selection in the wage and salary sector. We also investigate earnings differentials between natives and immigrants who arrived in the country before the age of 6. Our main results are that the part of differentials due to difference in coefficient varies strongly with different ethnic groups considered, that education is a strong determinant of the difference in observed characteristics and that second generation immigrants are fairly well assimilated in the Swiss labour market. Copyright Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001.

Location intentions of immigrants at retirement: stay/return or go 'back and forth'?

This article analyses the intentions of immigrants regarding their residential choice after retirement. Three options are investigated: stay in the host country, go back to the origin country and adopt a mobile strategy, sharing time between the host and the origin country (defined as ‘back and forth’). For this purpose, we analyse a cross section of non-French nationals aged above 45 who are not yet retired. The impacts of several potential determinants of such intentions are investigated, with particular focus on the effect of the actual location of the respondents’ children. The estimation is conducted using a multinomial Logit model. Instrumental variable technique is used to address the issue of endogenous childrens location with respect to parents’ location intention. Results suggest that the immigrants prefer to return rather than stay in the host country when their children live in the country of origin. However, childrens location does not seem to affect the ‘back and forth’ strategy with respect to staying in the host country.

Self-Selection and the Performance of Return Migrants: The Case of Albania

In this paper, using the framework of a Roy theoretical model, we examine the performance of return migrants in Albania. We ask two questions: (i) Had they chosen not to migrate, what would be the performance of return migrants compared to the non-migrants? and (ii) What would be the performance of non-migrants had they decided to migrate and return? Both the selection estimates and the semi-parametric approach allow us to conclude that the flows of return migrants are negatively selected. We find that, had they decided to migrate and come back, the non-migrants would have earned more than twice the wages of return migrants.

Language proficiency of immigrants and misclassification

We study the determinants of language proficiency, reading and speaking, for a sample of immigrants living in France and allow for misclassification errors since language proficiency is based on subjective self-reported evaluations. Using a parametric maximum likelihood method, we find that the probabilities of misclassification are large. Misclassification is mainly due to immigrants experiencing actual language problems, but who do not report them.

A Longitudinal Analysis of UK Second-Generation Disadvantaged Immigrants

In this paper we consider the relative academic achievement in primary school of second generation immigrant children in the UK. We use data for a cohort born in 1970 and find that children born to South Asian or Afro-Caribbean parents have significantly lower levels of cognitive achievement in both mathematics and language in primary school. We then investigated the progression of ethnic minority children in primary school i.e. between age 5 and 10. This analysis indicates that the negative impact from being born to South Asian parents decreases during primary school and the negative effect from being born to Afro-Caribbean parents remains approximately stable. Evidence from the current education system (Wilson et al. 2009) suggests that although ethnic minority children have relatively low achievement on exit from primary school, they also experience considerable catch up and indeed overtake their White counterparts during secondary school. Our evidence shows that even as long ago as the late 1970s, some groups of ethnic minority pupils, namely those from South Asia, were showing signs of ‘catch up’ in primary school.

Low-Pay Mobility in the Swiss Labor Market ∗

This paper uses a panel of 7617 individuals drawn from the Swiss Labor Force Survey (SLFS) to study i) low-pay incidence and ii) individual transition probabilities at the lower end of the wage distribution. In a first step, various raw transition probabilities are computed for the period between 1992 and 1998, and some descriptive and comparative statistics on wage mobility are presented. In the second step, the determinants of low-pay incidence are estimated, and in a third step, the determinants of transitions into and out of the low-pay segment are analyzed. This analysis is based on a bivariate probit model which takes into account the potential endogeneity of the initial state. With regard to low-pay incidence the results to a large extent confirm previous ones obtained by standard wage equations. Low-pay incidence is influenced by certain personal characteristics, but as well by the affiliation to particular economic sectors. When investigating mobility, it is found that low-pay spells are both, transitory and persistent events. On the one hand, many workers low-paid at some point in time succeed to escape the lowpay segment within a two-year period. For those remaining low-paid, on the other hand, our results suggest that state dependence rather than heterogeneity seems to affect more the persistence in low-pay status.