RG 5675/1: Labour Supply of Immigrants (SP 05)

The project investigates the labor supply dynamics of immigrants from two perspectives. The first part analyses how immigrants adjust labor supply in response to economic shocks and evaluates its consequences on economic recovery through return migration, unemployment and labor market sorting of immigrants and natives in the medium run. We leverage exogenous variation in the size and composition of the migrant labor force across industries and geographies from one of the largest labor recruitment programs in European history - the German Guest Worker Program in the 1950s and 1960s - and exploit the unexpected surge in oil prices in 1973/74. The second part focuses on female descendants of these immigrants and investigates how gender norms influence their current labor force participation in Germany. For this purpose, we employ survey experiments that enable us to measure differences in implicit and explicit gender beliefs and to identify the role of peer groups in the formation of gender norms. Our results will inform policy makers on how to design immigration and integration policies that are effective and sustainable, going beyond myopic remedies to urgent labor shortages and taking into account the long-term consequences of these policies.