OSC Scientific Seminar 2020-2021

Friday, 22nd January 2021, 11:30 am / 1 pm (Zoom videoconference)

To work or to sudy ? Immigrants' educational investments after migration
Evidence from a choice experiment among adult refugees in Germany

Yuliya Kosyakova & Andreas Damelang

 Yuliya Kosyakova is a senior researcher at the Institute for Employment Research
(IAB), Nuremberg, and a lecturer at the University of Mannheim and University of Bamberg.

Andreas Damelang is senior researcher at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg
(FAU).

In this presentation, we analyze individual factors and situational conditions under which immigrants are more or less likely to invest in host country-specific human capital.

Theoretically, we root our expectations in a strand of the immigrant human capital investment model combined with a basic model of educational decisions.

Using a choice experiment, we simulate a decision process among refugees in Germany and examine the determinants of investment decisions into host country-specific credentials such as vocational education.

The choice experiment was introduced in the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees (2020), a representative longitudinal sur-vey of recently arrived refugees in Germany.

We find that refugees’ probability of investing in vocational education is guided by the transferability of foreign human capital, the time horizon to reap investments, and rational cost-benefit considerations. The probability of success is influential on its own but also bolsters the relevance of costs and benefits in educational choices

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