My team and I have worked extensively on several projects.
We have written the paper “Free Movement, Open Borders and the Global Gains from Labor Mobility” (joint with Ian Preston) which provides a deep and extensive assessment of the global gains of immigration.
The paper “The Impact of Immigration on Regions and Workers” (joint with Sebastian Otten, Uta Schoenberg and Jan Stuhler) provides a detailed analysis of the impact immigration has on wages and employment, developing a novel and comprehensive framework for the different effects immigration may have on different groups of workers. This work points out that conventional analysis that assesses the impact immigration has on employment and wages, on the basis of repeated cross-sectional data, estimates composite parameters that measure the effect immigration has on regions, but not on particular groups of workers, and thus does not answer many relevant questions.
The paper "Real Exchange Rates and the Earnings of Immigrants" (joint with Hyejin Ku and Tanya Surovtseva) relates origin-destination real price differences to immigrants’ reservation wages and their career trajectories in the host country, based on administrative labor market data from Germany that allows us to follow the same individuals over time.
The project “Refugee Benefit Cuts” (joint with Lars Højsgaard Andersen and Rasmus Landersø) which analyses the effects of Denmark’s Start Aid welfare reform studies not only the reform’s immediate effects but also the longer-term consequences of a reform that dramatically curtailed benefit transfers to refugees - similar to many reforms currently discussed in EU countries.
The paper "Immigration and Inequality" (joint with Yannis Kastis and Ian Preston) is concerned with the interplay between immigration and inequality and develops a framework to investigate the relationship between inequality and immigration in destination countries, through its impact on wages, on the composition of the workforces, and on the location of the overall distributions of earnings both in the short run and over time. It also discusses distributional issues, and how attitudinal responses may relate to the expected economic consequences of immigration. An application to the UK shows that immigration had only very small effects on overall inequality. T
The paper "The Dynamics of Return Migration, Human Capital Accumulation, and Wage Assimilation" (joint with Jerome Adda and Simon Gorlach) develops and estimates a dynamic model where individuals differ in ability and location preference to evaluate the mechanisms that affect the evolution of immigrants’ careers in conjunction with their re-migration plans.
The paper "Refugee Migration and the Labor Market: Lessons from 40 years of Post-arrival Policies in Denmark" (joint with Jacob Nielsen Arendt and Hyejin Ku) focusses on Denmark which has accepted refugees from a large variety of countries and for more than four decades and has also frequently changed policies and regulations concerning integration programs, transfer payments, and conditions for permanent residency.
The paper "The Labor Market Integration of Refugee Migrants in High-Income Countries" (joint with Courtney Brell and Ian Preston) provides an overview of the labor market outcomes of refugees in a variety of developed countries, based on an unusually broad collection of existing micro data sources, supplemented by evidence from data made available to us by a number of authors who have studied the topic. The paper illustrates that refugee immigrants find it far more difficult t pick up employment than economic migrants, and that their earnings catch up only gradually. This paper speaks to issues under (ii) and (iii).
