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FirmStrat

Firm Evidence on Ethnic Stratification: Work Organizations, Employment Segregation, and Immigrant Economic Assimilation (FirmStrat)

What determines workplace segregation and inequality within organizations among immigrants and natives? Photo: Shutterstock.com

About the project

The FIRMSTRAT project promotes an organizational approach to the study of ethnic stratification in the labor market. Despite a vast literature on labor market inequalities between immigrants and natives, relatively few prior studies use data where employees are linked directly to their employers to study these issues. Thus, robust evidence about the role of firms and workplace contexts in the processes of immigrant assimilation is still limited. Yet, workplaces arguably constitute key local settings where economic rewards are allocated, social status is negotiated, and a substantial share of social interaction between adults unfolds.

The project will study ethnic workplace segregation and workplace inequalities in pay and career opportunities between the ethnic majority and immigrant-origin workers. Using high-quality LEE data and state-of-the-art panel data techniques, the project will, for example, be able to pinpoint workplace contexts where immigrant-native pay inequalities, net of individual human capital differences, typically are large and those where they are small or even reversed.

Are immigrant-native wage inequalities reduced in more bureaucratised workplaces where wage formation is more formalized? Are immigrant-native wage inequalities aggravated in workplaces where performance pay and bonuses are used? How does firm-level adoption of (skill-biased) technological innovations affect immigrant-origin employees at different skill levels? From a policy perspective, a better grasp of the proximate organizational mechanisms behind ethnic workplace inequalities will enable more targeted interventions and improved enforcement of equal opportunity laws.