Abstract
This article contributes to the literature on the models of immigrants’ labour market incorporation in Western Europe by analysing the employment returns to tertiary education for both natives and immigrants. By using yearly EU-LFS data (2005–2013) for a selection of Western European countries, cross-country differences in the employment returns to tertiary education are analysed separately by immigrant status and gender. In Continental Europe, where immigrant-native employment gaps before the crisis were much larger than in Southern Europe, immigrants are found to benefit more from tertiary education, and their returns are also higher than for natives, while the opposite holds in Southern European countries. The same pattern is found irrespective of gender, but cross-country differences are more pronounced among women. The article also documents that the crisis contributed to a cross-country convergence, although limited to men, in the degree of immigrant employment disadvantage, which increased substantially in Southern Europe while remaining unchanged or slightly declining in all other countries. Nevertheless, although immigrant-native employment gaps grew as high as in Continental Europe, immigrant men in Southern Europe are still found to benefit from lower returns to tertiary education than their native counterparts.
Highlights
The existence of substantial heterogeneity in immigrants’ labour market outcomes across Western European countries is well known
While immigrants should experience lower employment returns to education compared to natives, due to the limited transferability of human capital and educational credentials acquired in the origin country, a high immigrant-native employment gap should make immigrants’ possession of higher education more relevant
Before presenting the results of the analysis of the employment returns to tertiary education, Figures 2 and 3 show adjusted immigrant-native employment gaps across the selected Western European countries for men and women, 2 In my analytical sample, 86% of non-Western immigrants originate from Sub-Saharan and Latin American countries
Summary
The existence of substantial heterogeneity in immigrants’ labour market outcomes across Western European countries is well known. Since male immigrants are generally more affected than natives by negative economic conjunctures (Guzi, Kahanec, & Kureková, 2015b), the salience of higher education for their labour market attachment is expected to increase in the years following the onset of the crisis. This may hold especially true in Southern Europe, where employment returns for immigrants are expected to be low before the crisis and the latter has hit more severely
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