Abstract:
This paper investigates the impact of opening the labor market to qualified immigrants who hold fully equivalent diplomas as natives and share the same mother tongue. Leveraging the 2002 opening of the Swiss labor market to qualified workers from the European Union, we show that the policy led to a large inflow of young immigrants with highly heterogeneous effects on the wages and employment status of qualified natives. While incumbent natives experienced a wage gain and a decrease in the likelihood of becoming inactive, the opposite happened for young natives entering the labor market after the policy change.
