Emigrant Selection and Wages: The Case of Poland

Abstract

In this paper, I use a unique individual-level pre-migration labour market dataset for Poland to examine emigrant selection in two major destination countries, the United Kingdom and Germany. I compare the pre-migration observable and unobservable characteristics of emigrants with those of non-emigrants in Poland. First, I find that Polish emigrants to the UK are more similarly educated to non-emigrants while being more negatively selected on residual wages. Second, emigrants to Germany are disproportionately more likely to fall in the middle of the education distribution but they are no different than non-emigrants in terms of unobservable skills. The familiar predictions of the Borjas (1987) model allow me to partially undercover the mechanism driving the selection patterns of Polish emigrants. I contribute to the migrant selection literature by providing additional evidence on how migrants respond to differences in both labour markets and migration policies across countries. JEL-code: F22, J61, O15, D33

Skill Transferability and Immigrant-Native Wage Gaps

“…However, whether this condition is decided by immigrants with a strong desire to return home or results simply from discrimination (or perhaps entry barriers in some occupation) is hard to determine. Admittedly, the changes in emigrant regional distribution in the source country, as documented for Poland (Dustmann, Frattini and Rosso, 2015;Rosso, 2013), could also explain EU8 immigrants' poorer labour market performance over time, but such an effect is difficult to demonstrate using only destination country data because of the lack of information on region (and country) of previous residence.…”

The skills of Polish emigrants

“…For Poland, the data generally confirm that tertiary educated individuals are overrepresented among migrants (Chmielewska, 2015;Kaczmarczyk and Tyrowicz, 2015;OECD, 2015). Yet, as to emigration of Poles to the United Kingdom, Rosso (2013) finds that the picture is different when looking at unobserved skills, as measured by the residuals in a regression of wages on observed characteristics, including formal education. Results imply that individuals with lower earnings possibly reflecting lower unobserved skills are more likely to emigrate to the United Kingdom, which would be consistent with Borjas' (1987) model as returns to unobservable skills are lower in the United Kingdom than in Poland according to Rosso's data.…”