IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/zbw/espost/171452.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Social distance and wage inequalities for immigrants in Switzerland

Author

Listed:
  • Ebner, Christian
  • Helbling, Marc

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of the social distance between immigrants and Swiss natives on wage inequalities. Social distance is assumed to be high when immigrants come from a different culture, a different education system and speak a different language. By combining these three aspects, this article goes beyond existing studies that only focus on cultural differences. The empirical findings indicate that, net of education, immigrants with a high or very high social distance from the receiving society are strongly disadvantaged in terms of their salaries. Additional analyses show that the impact of typical explanatory factors for labour market success such as education, citizenship and length of stay also vary by the degree of social distance between immigrants and their destination country. The analyses are based on data from the Swiss Labour Force Survey for the years 2010 and 2011, which allow for detailed analyses on individual immigrant groups due to oversampling.

Suggested Citation

  • Ebner, Christian & Helbling, Marc, 2016. "Social distance and wage inequalities for immigrants in Switzerland," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 30(3), pages 436-454.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:espost:171452
    DOI: 10.1177/0950017015594096
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/171452/1/f-20019-full-text-Ebner-et_al-Social-distance-v3.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/0950017015594096?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Schmidt, Christoph M., 1997. "Immigrant performance in Germany: Labor earnings of ethnic German migrants and foreign guest-workers," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 37(Supplemen), pages 379-397.
    2. Jacob A. Mincer, 1974. "Introduction to "Schooling, Experience, and Earnings"," NBER Chapters, in: Schooling, Experience, and Earnings, pages 1-4, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Carlsson, Magnus & Rooth, Dan-Olof, 2007. "Evidence of ethnic discrimination in the Swedish labor market using experimental data," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 14(4), pages 716-729, August.
    4. Jacob A. Mincer, 1974. "Schooling, Experience, and Earnings," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number minc74-1.
    5. Christian Dustmann & Francesca Fabbri, 2003. "Language proficiency and labour market performance of immigrants in the UK," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 113(489), pages 695-717, July.
    6. Daron Acemoglu, 1998. "Why Do New Technologies Complement Skills? Directed Technical Change and Wage Inequality," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 113(4), pages 1055-1089.
    7. McManus, Walter & Gould, William & Welch, Finis, 1983. "Earnings of Hispanic Men: The Role of English Language Proficiency," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 1(2), pages 101-130, April.
    8. Stiglitz, Joseph E, 1975. "The Theory of "Screening," Education, and the Distribution of Income," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 65(3), pages 283-300, June.
    9. Kaas Leo & Manger Christian, 2012. "Ethnic Discrimination in Germany’s Labour Market: A Field Experiment," German Economic Review, De Gruyter, vol. 13(1), pages 1-20, February.
    10. Friedberg, Rachel M, 2000. "You Can't Take It with You? Immigrant Assimilation and the Portability of Human Capital," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 18(2), pages 221-251, April.
    11. Marianne Bertrand & Sendhil Mullainathan, 2004. "Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(4), pages 991-1013, September.
    12. Jacob A. Mincer, 1974. "Schooling and Earnings," NBER Chapters, in: Schooling, Experience, and Earnings, pages 41-63, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    13. Nabil Khattab & Ron Johnston, 2013. "Ethnic and Religious Penalties in a Changing British Labour Market from 2002 to 2010: The Case of Unemployment," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 45(6), pages 1358-1371, June.
    14. George J. Borjas, 2021. "Self-Selection and the Earnings of Immigrants," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Foundational Essays in Immigration Economics, chapter 4, pages 69-91, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    15. Chiswick, Barry R, 1978. "The Effect of Americanization on the Earnings of Foreign-born Men," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 86(5), pages 897-921, October.
    16. Burkert, Carola & Seibert, Holger, 2007. "Labour market outcomes after vocational training in Germany : equal opportunities for migrants and natives?," IAB-Discussion Paper 200731, Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Nürnberg [Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany].
    17. Phelps, Edmund S, 1972. "The Statistical Theory of Racism and Sexism," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 62(4), pages 659-661, September.
    18. Dennis J. Aigner & Glen G. Cain, 1977. "Statistical Theories of Discrimination in Labor Markets," ILR Review, Cornell University, ILR School, vol. 30(2), pages 175-187, January.
    19. Michael Spence, 1973. "Job Market Signaling," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 87(3), pages 355-374.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Daniel Auer, 2022. "Firing discrimination: Selective labor market responses of firms during the COVID-19 economic crisis," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 17(1), pages 1-30, January.
    2. Daniel Auer & Flavia Fossati, 2019. "The absent rewards of assimilation: how ethnic penalties persist in the Swiss labour market," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 17(2), pages 285-299, June.
    3. Frederik Thuesen, 2017. "Linguistic barriers and bridges: constructing social capital in ethnically diverse low-skill workplaces," Work, Employment & Society, British Sociological Association, vol. 31(6), pages 937-953, December.
    4. Andreas Damelang & Martin Abraham & Sabine Ebensperger & Felix Stumpf, 2019. "The Hiring Prospects of Foreign-Educated Immigrants: A Factorial Survey among German Employers," Work, Employment & Society, British Sociological Association, vol. 33(5), pages 739-758, October.
    5. Pieroni, Luca & d'Agostino, Giorgio & Lanari, Donatella, 2019. "The effects of language skills on immigrant employment and wages in Italy," MPRA Paper 91725, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Daniel Auer & Flavia Fossati, 2019. "The absent rewards of assimilation: how ethnic penalties persist in the Swiss labour market," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 17(2), pages 285-299, June.
    7. Frederik Thuesen & Vibeke Jakobsen & Nina T. Dalgaard & Bjørn C. A. Viinholt, 2020. "PROTOCOL: Interventions to improve the economic self‐sufficiency of unemployed immigrants from non‐Western countries," Campbell Systematic Reviews, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 16(4), December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Christian Ebner & Marc Helbling, 2016. "Social distance and wage inequalities for immigrants in Switzerland," Work, Employment & Society, British Sociological Association, vol. 30(3), pages 436-454, June.
    2. Bonin, Holger, 2017. "The Potential Economic Benefits of Education of Migrants in the EU," IZA Research Reports 75, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    3. Jens Ruhose, 2015. "Microeconometric Analyses on Economic Consequences of Selective Migration," ifo Beiträge zur Wirtschaftsforschung, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, number 61.
    4. Theodore Koutmeridis, 2013. "The Market for "Rough Diamonds": Information, Finance and Wage Inequality," CDMA Working Paper Series 201307, Centre for Dynamic Macroeconomic Analysis, revised 14 Oct 2013.
    5. Chiswick, Barry R. & Wang, Zhiling, 2019. "Social Contacts, Dutch Language Proficiency and Immigrant Economic Performance in the Netherlands," GLO Discussion Paper Series 419, Global Labor Organization (GLO).
    6. Valentine Fays & Benoît Mahy & François Rycx & Mélanie Volral, 2021. "Wage discrimination based on the country of birth: do tenure and product market competition matter?," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 53(13), pages 1551-1571, March.
    7. Feng, Andy & Graetz, Georg, 2017. "A question of degree: The effects of degree class on labor market outcomes," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 61(C), pages 140-161.
    8. Green, David A. & Worswick, Christopher, 2012. "Immigrant earnings profiles in the presence of human capital investment: Measuring cohort and macro effects," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 19(2), pages 241-259.
    9. Fossati, Flavia & Liechti, Fabienne & Auer, Daniel, 2020. "Can signaling assimilation mitigate hiring discrimination? Evidence from a survey experiment," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 65, pages 1-1.
    10. David Neumark & Judith Rich, 2019. "Do Field Experiments on Labor and Housing Markets Overstate Discrimination? A Re-examination of the Evidence," ILR Review, Cornell University, ILR School, vol. 72(1), pages 223-252, January.
    11. Sebastian Gundel & Heiko Peters, "undated". "Assimilation and Cohort Effects for German Immigrants," Working Papers 200123, Institute of Spatial and Housing Economics, Munster Universitary.
    12. Boll, Christina & Lagemann, Andreas, 2018. "Das Erwerbsverhalten von Eltern mit Migrationshintergrund: SOEP-basierte Befunde und deren Implikationen für Hamburg," HWWI Policy Papers 112, Hamburg Institute of International Economics (HWWI).
    13. Michael Chletsos & Stelios Roupakias, 2017. "Native-immigrant wage differentials in Greece: discrimination and assimilation," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 49(17), pages 1732-1736, April.
    14. Masood Gheasi & Peter Nijkamp & Piet Rietveld, 2017. "Wage gaps between native and migrant graduates of higher education institutions in the Netherlands," Letters in Spatial and Resource Sciences, Springer, vol. 10(3), pages 277-296, October.
    15. Ivana Fellini & Raffaele Guetto & Emilio Reyneri, 2018. "Poor Returns to Origin-Country Education for Non-Western Immigrants in Italy: An Analysis of Occupational Status on Arrival and Mobility," Social Inclusion, Cogitatio Press, vol. 6(3), pages 34-47.
    16. Hamid Beladi & Saibal Kar, 2015. "Skilled and Unskilled Immigrants and Entrepreneurship in a Developed Country," Review of Development Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 19(3), pages 666-682, August.
    17. Knize Estrada, Veronika J., 2018. "Migrant women labor-force participation in Germany : Human capital, segmented labor market, and gender perspectives," IAB-Discussion Paper 201812, Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Nürnberg [Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany].
    18. Chiswick, Barry R. & Wang, Zhiling, 2016. "Social Contacts, Dutch Language Proficiency and Immigrant Economic Performance in the Netherlands: A Longitudinal Study," IZA Discussion Papers 9760, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    19. Gao, Wenshu & Smyth, Russell, 2011. "Economic returns to speaking 'standard Mandarin' among migrants in China's urban labour market," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 342-352, April.
    20. Christina Boll & Andreas Lagemann, 2018. "Does Culture Trump Money? Employment and Childcare Use of Migrant and Non-Migrant Mothers of Pre-School Children in Germany," SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research 1015, DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:espost:171452. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/zbwkide.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.