Social assimilation and immigrants’ labour market outcomes

We analyse how immigrants’ level of social assimilation is related to their labour market outcomes. More precisely, we estimate the association between assimilation and employment, wages, underemployment, three measures of job satisfaction, overeducation and wages. Using Australian longitudinal data, we fnd that assimilation is strongly associated with employment and wages as well as a number of job satisfaction measures. We then split our data and repeat the analysis for before and after the fnancial crisis of 2008–2009. We fnd important diferences in the way assimilation is associated with diferent measures of labour market outcomes under diferent economic conditions. Finally, we explore mechanisms that may underlie the results.