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- Hammarstedt, Mats, 1965-
(författare)
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Making a living in a new country
- 2001
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of six self-contained essays focusing on immigrants' maintenance in Sweden. These six essays study immigrants' incomes from different sources. The first three focus on immigrants' incomes from work and on their position in the Swedish public transfer system. Essay I investigates whether there are differences in income from work between immigrants and natives and between different immigrant groups. The results show that there are such differences, not only between immigrants and natives but also between different categories of immigrants. Thus, as regards income from work, it is considerably lower among immigrant cohorts arriving late than for those arriving early as well as for natives. Furthermore, the variety in this respect is also great among immigrants from different regions. Essay II examines the reliance of immigrants on Sweden's public transfer system. The overall conclusion is that the immigrants' total level of participation in the public transfer system is determined by their rate of unemployment, their state of health, their length of residence in Sweden and on their origin. Essay III investigates whether there are differences between immigrants and natives in disposable income and the probability of having a low disposable income. The study shows that in both of these respects there are again differences between immigrants and natives as well as between different immigrant groups. The remaining three papers focus on self-employment. This is the main topic of Essay IV, which shows that non-Nordic immigrants arriving at an early date have higher self-employment rates than the native population. It seems as if self-employment among immigrants is to some extent positively correlated with time in the country. A number of possible explanations for the differences observed in self-employment rates between immigrants and natives and between different immigrant groups are presented in the study. In Essay V we direct our attention to the risk of re-unemployment for individuals assigned to the Swedish self employment scheme. The results show that non-European immigrants and immigrants from Eastern Europe run a higher risk of re-unemployment than the native population. Essay VI differs from the previous studies in its focus on second generation immigrants. The primary purpose of this paper is to investigate to what extent second generation immigrants in Sweden are pulled into self-employment by self-employment traditions. The main findings of the study are that such traditions seem to play an important role for the individual's self-employment propensity as regards the sons of fathers from Nordic, Eastern and Western European countries and also for natives. On the other hand, for the sons of male immigrants with a Southern or a non-European background self-employment traditions seem to be less important.
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| 2. |
- Holzer, Susanna, 1975-
(författare)
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University Choice, Equality, and Academic Performance
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis consists of three essays that examine issues on university attendance behavior, factorsof university completion, and the labor market value of a university diploma in Sweden. Essay [I] analyzes how the rapid expansion of higher education that increased the geographicalaccessibility to higher education in the 1990s affected university enrollment decisions amongvarious socioeconomic groups of young adults in Sweden. The empirical findings show that theprobability of enrollment in university education increases with accessibility to universityeducation. The results also indicate that accessibility adds to the likelihood of attending auniversity within the region of residence. Access to higher education more locally seems to havedecreased the social distance to higher education, meaning that the option of attending highereducation, as compared to entering the local labor market after upper secondary school, hasbecome a more common and a more natural alternative for more socioeconomic groups insociety. Essay [II] compares the performance of students in universities built before and after the largedecentralization and expansion of the higher educational system in Sweden, starting in the late1970s. Two outcome measures are used: (i) whether or not the student has obtained a degreewithin seven years after she initiated her studies; and (ii) whether or not she obtained 120 creditpoints (the requirement for most undergraduate degrees) within seven years. Controlling forseveral background variables as well as GPA scores in a binomial probit model, we show thatstudents at old universities are about 5 percentage points more likely to get a degree and about 9percentage points more likely to obtain 120 credit points. However, in an extended bivariatemodel where we consider selection on unobservables into university type, we cannot reject thepossibility of no difference in performance between the two university types. Essay [III] analyzes the labor market value of a university diploma (sheepskin) in Sweden. Incontrast to previous studies, this study only focuses on Swedish university students who havethree years of full time university education or more − where some have obtained a universitydegree, others not. The results show that for male students, the wage premium of possessing adegree, i.e. the sheepskin effect, is roughly 5-8 percent. For women, it is about 6-7 percent forthose who have completed four years of fulltime or more. For students who attended a moreprestigious university in the metropolitan areas in Sweden and majored in the natural sciences, asheepskin effect of roughly 13 percent for men and 22 percent for women is traced. However,this result did not hold among students who attended. Keywords: Higher education, university enrollment; university choice; accessibility; universitycompletion; selection bias; propensity score matching, sheepskin, human capital.
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