SOEP Research: Migration and Integration

The Impact of COVID-19 Government Responses on Remittances in Latin American Countries

Workers' remittances declined sharply as the COVID-19 pandemic spread in the first half of 2020, rebounding in the second half. This paper analyses the impact of containment and economic support measures on remittances sent to Latin America during 2019–2020 using a gravity model estimated with the Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood estimator (PPML). Results show that containment measures in receiving ...

The Dynamics of Recent Refugees’ Language Acquisition: How Do Their Pathways Compare to Those of Other New Immigrants?

Do the processes underlying destination-language acquisition differ between recently arrived refugees and other new immigrants? Based on a well-established model of language learning according to which language fluency is a function of efficiency, incentives, and exposure, this study addresses general processes of language learning as well as conditions specific to refugees. Longitudinal data on refugees ...

Foreign Accents in the Early Hiring Process: A Field Experiment on Accent-Related Ethnic Discrimination in Germany

Based on a field experiment conducted in Germany between October 2014 and October 2015, this article focuses on the disadvantages associated with the presence of a foreign accent in the early hiring process, when applicants call in response to a job advertisement to ask whether the position is still available. We examine whether a foreign accent influences employers’ behaviors via productivity considerations ...

Belonging or Estrangement – the European Refugee Crisis and its Effects on Immigrant Identity

This study deals with the impact of the 2015 European Refugee Crisis on the ethnic identity of resident migrants in Germany. To derive plausibly causal estimates, I exploit the quasi-experimental setting in Germany, by which refugees are allocated to different counties by state authorities without being able to choose their locations themselves. This study finds that higher...

The Economic Implications of Migration

Hate Is Too Great a Burden to Bear: Hate Crimes and the Mental Health of Refugees

Against a background of increasing violence against non-natives, we estimate the effect of hate crime on refugees’ mental health in Germany. For this purpose, we combine two datasets: administrative records on xenophobic crime against refugee shelters by the Federal Criminal Office and the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees. We apply a regression discontinuity design in time to estimate the effect of ...

Overcoming Barriers to Service Access: Refugees’ Professional Support Service Utilization and the Impact of Human and Social Capital

After arriving in a new country, refugees are most often dependent on professional support to reestablish their livelihood. It is however well documented that refugees face barriers when seeking access to services aimed at facilitating their settlement and integration. This study examines refugees’ support service needs and their actual utilization and investigates the impact of social and human capital ...

Prejudice in Disguise: Which Features Determine the Subtlety of Ethnically Prejudicial Statements?

In current immigration debates ethnic prejudice is often expressed in a subtle manner, which conceals its xenophobic content. However, previous research has only insufficiently examined the specific features that make certain ethnically prejudicial statements subtler, i.e., less readily identifiable as xenophobic, than others. The current study employs an experimental factorial survey design and assesses ...

Panel Data in Research on Mobility and Migration: A Review of Recent Advances

Panel data has become the gold standard for causal assessments of complex human behaviour in quantitative social science. The objective of this review is to examine and discuss how panel data and related methods contribute to the identification of causal relationships in spatial mobility research. We illustrate this by providing a succinct overview of recent progress in spatial mobility research, drawing ...

On the Right Track? – The Role of Work Experience in Migrant Mothers’ Current Employment Probability

This paper investigates the role of work experience in migrant mothers’ current employment in Germany. Unlike previous papers, we focus on actual experience and add the motherhood aspect. To this end, we use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel 2013-2018 including the IAB-SOEP Migration Sample. Having immigrated to Germany and female sex are the two treatments of our sample of 491 migrant mothers, ...