Immigrants’ returns to host country work experience (project 1)

The project studies how work experience in the host country affects immigrants’ wages, earnings, and employment. Experience is a key factor in economic models that aim at explaining individuals’ positions in the labour market. A lack of relevant experience is also a recurring explanation for the slow integration of newly arrived immigrants and the large, long-term differences between natives and immigrants. Despite this, knowledge about the significance of actual work experience for foreign-born individuals is limited. This project will use various statistical methods and highly detailed register data to increase our understanding. It will examine the overall importance of experience and how this has developed over time. The project will also more closely characterise and investigate the content of individuals’ experiences to learn, for example, whether experience from certain industries, companies, and occupations, and in different career phases, is more important than other types, and how this varies between workers with different genders, backgrounds, and levels of education.