Mette Foged

Mette Foged: "International Migration:A Destination Country and Migrant Perspective"

This dissertation is comprised of three self-contained chapters in the Economics of Migration. The first chapter investigates the economic incentives for international migration from a high wage country, more specifically Denmark. I follow the migrants abroad and link their labor market outcomes to reasons behind emigrating and work-activities abroad. Men migrate for job-related reasons, the majority due to a job-transfer, while women are accompanying their partner in the migration decision. This is reflected in the earnings and employment effects. Men gain, while women lose on average from the international mobility. Chapter two sets out to understand these gender-patterns. I show that couples are more likely to migrate if earnings are disproportionately due to one partner. Furthermore, families react equally strong to a male and a female relative earnings advantage within the household. This is evidence in favor of gender-neutral family migration, and contradicts a prevalent hypothesis that migration is husband-centered. Lower earnings and stronger educational homogamy among female headed households explain their lower mobility. The third chapter makes progress on a long standing issue in the Economics of Migration: the impacts of immigration on the labor market outcomes of native workers. We find that increased supply of low-skilled foreign workers pushed natives to pursue more complex and less manual-intensive jobs. The reallocation took place mainly through movement across firms and resulted in higher or unchanged wages for the native workers. Thus, immigration increased the mobility of natives, but we also find that it did not increase their probability of unemployment.