Minimum wages and the integration of refugee immigrants

This paper is the first to estimate the effects of minimum wages on the unemployment of refugee immigrants. The collectively agreed minimum wages raise both the incidence of unemployment and days in unemployment considerably for male refugees in Sweden; different estimation methods and models yield robust elasticities in the 1.8–2.0 range. The effects for young male natives are about half as large. There are heterogeneous effects with regard to country of origin and time of residence in Sweden for both male and female refugees. We account for spatial trends – a concern in some of the recent literature – as well as industrial trends. It turns out that only the latter affect our results. **We acknowledge comments on an early version from Per Hjertstrand, Eskil Wadensjö and participants at the NORFACE conference “Migration, Global Development, New Frontiers”, University College, London, and at seminars at IFN and SOFI. The second author gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation. ___________________________________________________________________________ * Swedish Institute of Social Research (SOFI), Stockholm University, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected]. Phone: +46 8 16 23 10. # Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), Box 55665, SE-102 15 Stockholm, Sweden, and Linnaeus University Centre for Labour Market and Discrimination Studies, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected]. Phone: +46 8 665 45 53.