Immigrants’ Career Changes in German Organizations

This project, financed for three years by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) at the University of Mannheim, is lead by Philipp Brandt, Assistant Professor at the CSO. His collaborators are Jeremy Kuhnle, Resarch Assistant of the University of Trente and Henning Hillmann, Professor at the University of Mannheim helped by Marcel Kappes, doctorant.

Summary :

Immigrants face considerable disadvantages in labor markets.

This project studies the careers of immigrants in German firms, focusing on the informal strategies that immigrants use to navigate the firms’ internal labor markets and to compensate for existing disadvantages. Using Linked-Employer-Employee Data (LIAB) of the German Institute for Employment Research, we follow several thousand immigrants over the course of their working lives and through the organizations that employed them. The dataset also includes information on the work histories of their almost two million colleagues within the same firms. This comprehensive dataset allows us to consider the role that organizational structures and work histories, particularly early career moves, play in the economic integration of immigrants from a career perspective. We develop new measures for a better understanding two key dimensions of informal career strategies: career resemblance and organizational exposure. Career resemblance measures the similarity between an immigrants’ individual career and typical careers of both Germans and immigrants. Organizational exposure measures the degree to which an immigrant employee takes on different jobs within an organization, contingent on the positions available in the given organization. We then use longitudinal data analysis and matching techniques to assess how immigrants’ early career moves affect subsequent job shifts, earnings, and career trajectories. The important contribution of our proposed project is thus to demonstrate the significance of informal career strategies for understanding why some immigrants succeed in overcoming the challenges they face in the labor market and why others fail to do so.