Laura Helena Kivi will defend her doctoral thesis „Regional labour markets and assimilation of foreign labour force“

On 13 December at 10:15 Laura Helena Kivi will defend her doctoral thesis „Regional labour markets and assimilation of foreign labour force“ for obtaining the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (in Economics)

Supervisor:
Professor emeritus Tiiu Paas, University of Tartu
 

Opponents:
Associate Professor Matti Sarvimäki, Aalto University (Finland)

Professor Kadri Männasoo, Tallinn University of Technology (Estonia)

Summary

The focus of this thesis is on the regional labour markets of the European Union, their spatial interactions, and the assimilation of the foreign labour force in the host country's labour market, using the example of Estonia. Foreign labour force constitutes a significant share of the total labour force in the regional labour markets. In 2021, 13% of all the labour force in the European Union were foreign-born. While foreign-born form a substantial share of the total labour force, their labour market outcomes tend to be inferior to those of the native-born. Furthermore, labour migration movements and commuting create connections between neighbouring regional labour markets, known as spatial interactions, which explain a significant share of the variation in the regional labour market indicators. The thesis investigates several important questions. First, how do regional labour markets affect each other through spatial interactions. Second, how do the foreign labour force and their descendants assimilate to the regional labour market in the long term. Last, how is the assimilation of foreign labour force and their descendants impacted by the local language skills. The thesis leads to several interesting conclusions. First, the analysis of spatial interactions leads to the conclusion that significant spatial dependence exists between European regional labour markets. Cooperation effects dominate meaning that in general regions benefit from the employment rate growth of the neighbouring regions. The increases in the labour mobility in EU have been accompanied by increases in the strength of spatial interactions. Second, the analysis of the intergenerational transmissions for immigrant families indicates that besides the transmission of human capital, other channels, such as the transmission of common values, common contact networks and neighbourhood effects could be important aspects of intergenerational earnings transmissions. The relative intergenerational earnings mobility is found to be around the same magnitude in Estonia for immigrant and native families, however the absolute mobility is lower for the immigrant families. Last, the analysis of the role of local language training shows that language training helps unemployed non-natives to find employment but does not lead to wage premium.

The defence fill be held in Narva Rd 18–1018 and online

Thesis: https://hdl.handle.net/10062/94387

 

Image