Documents Bratsberg, Bernt 7 results

"Is it possible to sustain an ambitious and redistributive Nordic welfare state in a Europe with open borders? Drawing on longitudinal administrative records spanning four decades, we first present discouraging historical evidence showing that labor migrants from low?income source countries tend to have unstable employment careers with marked overrepresentation in welfare programs. This pattern extends to post?accession labor migrants from Eastern Europe, who quickly experience high rates of unemployment. The article discusses possible avenues for making the welfare state "migration robust." We argue that there are alternatives to reclosing borders and/or cutting down welfare state ambitions, and recommend policies based on strengthening of activity requirements in social insurance programs, raising minimum job standards, and substitution of work?oriented services for cash?based family allowances."

"Based on individual longitudinal data, we examine the evolution of employment and earnings of post?EU accession Eastern European labour immigrants to Norway for a period of up to eight years after entry. We find that the migrants were particularly vulnerable to the negative labour demand shock generated by the financial crisis. During the winter months of 2008/09, the fraction of immigrant men claiming unemployment insurance benefits rose from below 2 to 14 per cent. Some of this increase turned out to be persistent, and unemployment remained considerably higher among immigrants than natives even three years after the crisis. Although we find that negative labour demand shocks raise the probability of return migration, the majority of the labour migrants directly affected by the downturn stayed in Norway and claimed unemployment insurance benefits."

"Based on administrative register data matched with firms' financial statements and closure data collected from bankruptcy proceedings, we show that a large fraction of Norwegian disability insurance claims can be directly attributed to job displacement and other adverse shocks to employment opportunities. For men, we estimate that job loss more than doubles the risk of permanent disability retirement and accounts for one quarter of new disability insurance claims. Firm profitability and tightness of the local labor market also significantly affect employees' likelihood of disability program entry, and the adverse effects of displacement grow stronger when local labor market conditions deteriorate."

"Recent research has suggested that the long-observed negative association between seniority and pay among college faculty largely reflects below-average research productivity of senior faculty-a possibility that most earlier studies did not examine. Overlooked in both waves of studies, however, is match quality. Because the higher quality of the faculty/institutional match implied by higher seniority should, all else equal, result in higher salaries, failure to account for match quality inflates the estimated returns to seniority. Indeed, that positive bias, the authors find, is roughly equal in magnitude to the negative bias caused by failure to account for research quantity and quality. When they account for both match quality and faculty research productivity in an analysis of data on economics faculty at five research universities over a 21-year period, the authors estimate that, holding experience and other factors constant, the penalty for twenty years of seniority is 16% of salary."

"A new Report “Integrating immigrants into the Nordic labour markets. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic” by Nordregio and the Nordic Council of Minsters shows that the Covid-19 pandemic has made social and economic inequalities even more pronounced in the Nordic countries. In all countries, foreign-born people have experienced stronger increases in unemployment than their native-born peers. Immigrants born outside the EU, especially individuals with low levels of education, have faced the largest challenges in finding and keeping employment in 2020.

In the new report, researchers stress that the current crisis also underscores the need for uniform social insurance systems. Statistics from Norway show that immigrants from new EU member countries in Central and Eastern Europe have been vastly overrepresented among job losers. Hence, the inclusion of these workers in a relatively generous social insurance system has been critical to prevent poverty and minimize demand-driven ‘knock-on effects' from income decline in industries directly affected by the crisis.

This study builds on a comprehensive report about immigrant integration into the Nordic labour markets that was published by the Nordic Council of Ministers in 2019. It revisits some of the conclusions and policy recommendations outlined in 2019 – in relation to the impact of Covid-19 on unemployment among foreign-born. The report is part of the Nordic Cooperation Programme for Integration of Immigrants, initiated in 2016, in which the Nordic Welfare Centre and Nordregio cooperate. "

"We study the impact of work loss on mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Combining data on work loss and health care consultations from comprehensive individual-level register data, we define groups of employees delineated by industry, region, age, and gender. With these groups, we use a difference-in-differences framework to document significantly increased rates of consultations for psychological conditions among workers with higher exposure to work loss. The increases, and their persistence, were markedly higher for consultations in specialist (vs. primary) care, indicating that the deterioration of mental health was more than a widespread increase in lighter symptoms. Overall, our findings suggest that the economic disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic adversely affected the mental health of workers most exposed to loss of work."