I examine the impact of language skills on immigrants’ labor market performance by applying a new approach, which allows to estimate wage benefits attributed to initial language skills at arrival. By exploiting unique data, I isolate the endogenous part of current German skills and instrument current command by German proficiency measured retrospectively at the point in time of migration. This approach tackles the problem that labor market effects from current language skills are at risk to reflect merely the sum of a successful residence in Germany and only display growth effects. I find that a good command of German increases labor market income by 47.0% for males, while no significant language effects are detected for females. Further analyses illustrate that differences in language effects by gender can be attributed to selection into different occupations and part-time employments and that language operates complementary and enables cross-border transferability of human capital.
SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research at DIW Berlin This series presents research findings based either directly on data from the German SocioEconomic Panel study (SOEP) or using SOEP data as part of an internationally comparable data set (e.g. CNEF, ECHP, LIS, LWS, CHER/PACO). SOEP is a truly multidisciplinary household panel study covering a wide range of social and behavioral sciences:
We use quasi‐experimental expansion of publicly funded childcare slots for children under the age of three from Germany and exploit regional variations of this large‐scale expansion to account for endogenous and selective fertility decisions. To account for left and right censoring, we implement this quasi‐experimental framework into the setting of the semiparametric Cox hazard model. By using spatial data on childcare provision at the level of counties and microdata from the German Socio‐Economic Panel (SOEP) from 1998 to 2012, we find a significant increase in the transition probability to first birth by 11.9% for native childless couples who were in the labor force before childbearing. With regard to transition to the second birth, however, no significant effect is found from the increase in childcare slots. With a particular focus on the transition to first birth, the effects are demonstrated not to be driven by selective residency choices and internal migration patterns. Furthermore, a large set of robustness checks is applied to show that highly educated mothers react the most, while effects are not attributable to the upper decile of income distribution.
This paper provides evidence on the effect of apprenticeship costs on the decision whether care facilities employ apprenticeship graduates after completing apprenticeship training. To account for the endogeneity in apprenticeship costs, we exploit an exogenous reduction in the apprenticeship costs of care facilities by exploiting the fact that the underlying apprenticeship levy was introduced across the German federal states at different points in time. We find that the redistribution of apprenticeship costs increases the probability of leaving the training facility after completing apprenticeship training by 10 percentage points. Furthermore, we use this quasi-experimental setting to estimate the effect of mobility of graduates on their wages, which hints at a negative relationship in the upper quartile of the wage distribution.
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