Abstract

This project investigates the role that pre-immigration skills play in immigrants job-finding processes in Germany. We first show theoretically that the job-finding rate for the high-skilled varies depending on the search strategy they use. If they are prepared to look for both unskilled as well as skilled jobs, then their expected time to find a job is lower compared to the low-skilled. However, if the high-skilled are only prepared to look for and take up skilled jobs, it might be that they actually need longer to find a job. We then provide empirical evidence for the proposed model by studying the labour-market integration process of Ethnic Germans directly after immigration using novel German administrative data. Applying proportional hazard models, our estimates generally support the theoretical predictions: in case of cross-skill matching in which high-skilled look for all types of jobs, the job finding rate of the high- and low-skilled in general does not differ significantly. If the high-skilled only search for skilled jobs, the likelihood of finding a Job much lower compared to the low-skilled. In a further step we implement a timing-of-events regresson and find evidence that the high-skilled can promote their chances of finding high-skilled jobs if they first take up a low-skilled job and use this as a stepping stone.