Ryszard Szulkin

Permanent Disadvantage or Gradual Integration: Explaining the Immigrant-Native Earnings Gap in Sweden

Theoretical explanations suggest that wage differentials between immigrant and native workers are generated either by unequal acquisition of human capital between the groups or by various forms of exclusion of immigrants from fair labor market rewards. We evaluate the labor quality and labor market discrimination hypotheses by using a large sample of Swedish employees in 1995. Our findings show that labor market integration is relatively unproblematic for immigrants from Western countries, whereas immigrants from other countries, especially from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, face substantial obstacles to earnings progress when entering the Swedish labor market. For the latter group of countries, extensive controls for general and country-specific human capital reduce the earnings differentials. However, the remaining gap is of a non-trivial magnitude. Thus, the labor quality hypothesis accounts for a part of the observed native-immigrant wage gap, but the remaining differentials can be interpreted in terms of labor market discrimination.

Ethnic Environment During Childhood and the Educational Attainment of Immigrant Children in Sweden

We ask whether ethnic residential segregation influences the future educational careers of children of immigrants in Sweden. We use a dataset comprising a cohort of children who finished compulsory school in 1995 (n = 6,560). We follow these children retrospectively to 1990 to measure neighborhood characteristics during late childhood, and prospectively through 2003 to measure the number of years of education attained thus far. The largest immigrant groups came from Finland, Turkey, former Yugoslavia, Iran and Chile. Our empirical analysis reveals that immigrant children who grow up in neighborhoods with many young coethnics who have limited educational resources, obtain relatively low average grades from compulsory school, and on average, do not attain the same levels of education as do immigrant children who grow up elsewhere. For a minority of immigrant children who lived in neighborhoods with educationally successful young coethnics, we find a positive effect of growing up in an ethnic enclave. Also in this case, the effect of the ethnic environment on future educational attainment is mediated by school results in compulsory school.

Making People Work: Control and Incentives in Swedish Organizations

There are two main strategies to elicit effort from employees: control and incentives. The issue addressed in this paper is how systems of control and incentives are related, and how they are embedded in the organizational structure. The analyses are based on data from a national survey of Swedish public and private sector organizations. According to the findings, the degree of bureaucratization is not only positively related to the extent to which employees are controlled, but also to the level of incentives. The results also indicate that employers using selective incentives rely on monitoring and output control in order to establish who will get ahead and why. Furthermore, some results show that the control level is relatively low in organizations which use general rather than selective incentives. Hence, the idea that incentives and control are functional equivalents appears to be invalid for selective incentives.

Using register data to estimate causal effects of interventions: An ex post synthetic control-group approach

Aims: It is common in the context of evaluations that participants have not been selected on the basis of transparent participation criteria, and researchers and evaluators many times have to make do with observational data to estimate effects of job training programs and similar interventions. The techniques developed by researchers in such endeavours are useful not only to researchers narrowly focused on evaluations, but also to social and population science more generally, as observational data overwhelmingly are the norm, and the endogeneity challenges encountered in the estimation of causal effects with such data are not trivial. The aim of this article is to illustrate how register data can be used strategically to evaluate programs and interventions and to estimate causal effects of participation in these. Methods: We use propensity score matching on pretreatment-period variables to derive a synthetic control group, and we use this group as a comparison to estimate the employment-treatment effect of participation in a large job-training program. Results: We find the effect of treatment to be small and positive but transient. Conclusions: Our method reveals a strong regression to the mean effect, extremely easy to interpret as a treatment effect had a less advanced design been used (e.g. a within-subjects panel data analysis), and illustrates one of the unique advantages of using population register data for research purposes.

Ethnic Composition of Schools and Students’ Educational Outcomes: Evidence from Sweden

We examine the impact of ethnic school composition on students’ educational outcomes using Swedish population register data. We add to the literature on the consequences of ethnic school segregation for native and immigrant students by distinguishing social interaction effects from selection and environmental effects through one- and two-way fixed effects models. Our findings demonstrate that native and immigrant students’ grades are relatively unaffected by social interaction effects stemming from the proportion of immigrant schoolmates. However, we find nontrivial effects on their eligibility for upper secondary school. Immigrants’ educational outcomes are weakly positively affected by the proportion of co-ethnics in school.