#2020-023 Occupational sorting and wage gaps of refugees
Christopher F Baum, Hans Lööf, Andreas Stephan & Klaus F. Zimmermann
Refugee workers start low and adjust slowly to the wages of comparable
natives. The innovative approach in this study using unique Swedish
employeremployee data shows that the observed wage gap between
established refugees and comparable natives is mainly caused by
occupational sorting into cognitive and manual tasks. Within
occupations, it can be largely explained by differences in work
experience. The identification strategy relies on a control group of
matched natives with the same characteristics as the refugees, using
panel data for 2003–2013 to capture unobserved heterogeneity.
Keywords: refugees, wage earnings gap, Blinder—Oaxaca decomposition,
employer-employee data, coarsened exact matching, correlated random
effects model
JEL Classification: C23, F22, J24, J6, O15
