Short and medium run occupational mismatches of recent immigrants

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Résumé (français)

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Résumé (anglais)

This study describes the short and medium run occupational gap of recent immigrants with different education levels, language proficiency, immigration categories and ethnic occupational quality. I defineoccupational gap as the difference between the quality of an occupation in Canada and the quality of the occupation held in the home country. The average logarithm of weekly wages is used as a proxy for the quality of an occupation. I find that people with high levels of education experience a more significant decline in their occupational status in their first occupation. In addition, education has a positive butnot significant effect on occupational improvement from the first to the second occupation. This makesthe effect of education in the second occupational gap to be negative though not robustly significant.Immigrants proficient on the language of the city tend to have a lower mismatch; however, language proficiency is also not statistically important to explain occupational improvement. Being admitted as a”Family” immigrant has not statistically effect though entering as a “Skilled Worker – S and D” shows asignificant negative effect on some specification. The average ethnic occupational quality has no relevanteffect on occupational gap; however, people who get their (first or second) occupation directly through family or friends have a larger occupational mismatch. Trying to address concerns about city selectionI run robustness checks incorporating a relatively new self-selection correction procedure and focusing on immigrants who chose a city for non-economic reasons. The probability of changing occupations isdetermine by the first occupational gap, no other variable shows robust significance to explain the occu-pational change. Overall, the evidence suggest that the labor conditions immigrants face at arrival do not change substantially in the first 36 months of employment