AMU - AMSE
5-9 Boulevard Maurice Bourdet, CS 50498
13205 Marseille Cedex 1
Raux
Publications
Integration of immigrants into their host society is at the core of the public debate in most OECD countries. Im-migrant integration includes two distinct dimensions: cultural and economic integration. This paper investigates the interplay between these two processes and presents three main results. First, it documents that immigrants from more culturally distant countries earn lower wages when they enter the German labor market. Second, it highlights that these wage differences progressively diminish over years spent in Germany and even disappear in some cases. For instance, the wage gap associated with a one standard deviation difference in religious and genetic distance disappears after 15 to 20 years. Finally, the paper provides evidence that immigrants who ex-perience a greater increase in cultural assimilation experience more wage growth as well. Taken together, these results suggest that the cultural assimilation process can benefit the economic integration of immigrants.
We provide an estimate of the environmental impact of the recruitment system in the economics profession, known as the “international job market for economists”. Each year, most graduating PhDs seeking jobs in academia, government, or companies participate in this job market. The market follows a standardized process, where candidates are pre-screened in a short interview which takes place at an annual meeting in Europe or in the United States. Most interviews are arranged via a non-profit online platform, econjobmarket.org, which kindly agreed to share its anonymized data with us. Using this dataset, we estimate the individual environmental impact of 1057 candidates and one hundred recruitment committees who attended the EEA and AEA meetings in December 2019 and January 2020. We calculate that this pre-screening system generated the equivalent of about 4800 tons of avoidable CO2-eq and a comprehensive economic cost over €4.4 million. We contrast this overall assessment against three counterfactual scenarios: an alternative in-person system, a hybrid system (where videoconference is used for some candidates) and a fully online system (as it happened in 2020–21 due to the COVID-19 pandemic). Overall, the study can offer useful information to shape future recruitment standards in a more sustainable way.
This note evaluates the scrambled questions penalty using multiple choice tests taken by first-year undergraduate students who follow a microeconomics introductory course. We provide new evidence that students perform worse at scrambled questionnaires than at logically ordered ones. We improve on previous studies by explicitly modeling students individual skills thanks to a fixed effects regression. We further show that the scrambled questions penalty does not differ along gender but varies along the distribution of students' skills and mostly affects students with lower-intermediate skills.