GVC/City REDI Seminar Series: Ceren Ozgen

Seminar title: Does Past Experience and Exposure to Foreigners at Workplace Increase Earnings Growth?

This research is part of the Migrant Diversity and Regional Disparity in Europe (MIDI-REDIE) project, funded by the NORFACE research programme Migration in Europe: Social, Economic, Cultural and Policy Dynamics.

Speaker: Ceren Ozgen (University of Birmingham, Economics/IRIS)

Abstract

The recent migration literature emphasizes the importance of cultural diversity for increased productivity at the regional and firm level. Most of the empirical evidence so far, provided through area level studies, examines whether the natives' wages are higher in metropolitan areas where culturally and linguistically diverse group of immigrants are located. The intuition behind finding an economic value in diversity is the potential it offers for enhanced creativity and innovativeness through combining varied ideas, knowledge, and skills of different cultures. At a more refined level, we estimate workers' earnings growth with respect to their past employment experience. Our identification strategy relies on comparing wage growth of workers belonging to the same firm, yet with different past employment experiences. Using administrative data from the Netherlands, we study wage growth of about 40,000 young employees with four years of work experience for the period 2004-2008. We demonstrate that employees who were employed in larger firms experience less wage growth later on. Having worked in multicultural firms neither in terms of number of foreigners or the composition of foreigners does not affect wage growth.

About the speaker

Ceren Ozgen is a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Fellow at the Department of Economics and IRiS, University of Birmingham, UK since September 2016. She received her PhD degree from the Department of Spatial Economics, VU University Amsterdam. Her PhD thesis is entitled ‘Impacts of Immigration and Cultural Diversity on Innovation and Economic Growth’ and utilizes rich micro-data sets and administrative data from Netherlands/Europe for a wide range of econometric modelling applications. She has written extensively on the labor market impacts of international migration, cultural diversity and firm innovation. Her research interests include labor and demographic economics, international migration, innovation, applied microeconomics and urban theory.