Estimating the wage premia of refugee immigrants

Session

In this case study, we examine the wage earnings of fully-employed previous refugee immigrants in Sweden. Using administrative employer-employee data from 1990 onwards, about 100,000 refugee immigrants who arrived between 1980 and 1996 and were granted asylum are compared to a matched sample of native-born workers using coarsened exact matching. Employing recentered influence function (RIF) quantile regressions to wage earnings for the period 2011– 2015, the occupational-task-based Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition approach shows that refugees perform better than natives at the median wage, controlling for individual and firm characteristics. The RIF-quantile approach provides better insights for the analysis of these wage differentials than the standard regression model employed in earlier versions of the study.