Seminar 5

Date: March 17, 2014

Time: 1pm – 2:15pm

Venue: Room 2175, Level 2, Haydon-Allen Building, The Australian National University

Speaker: Dr Irma Mooi Reci,Senior Lecturer, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne.

Paper title: Composition, Context and Opportunity: Explaining the Unemployment Gap between Immigrant and Native Workers in the Spanish Labor Market

Paper abstract:

This study examines the unemployment gap between immigrants and native workers in the Spanish labor market. Our study extends current research by not only asking if composition and contextual effects explain the unemployment gap but explores whether and how the likelihood to be unemployed changes depending on the economic context. To explain the process generating the unemployment gap between the different immigrant groups we derive our hypotheses from the human capital, segmentation and signaling theories. We test our hypotheses by using a rich longitudinal data set from the Spanish Labor Force Survey (LFS) with quarterly observations spanning over 2005-2010. Results from a series probit panel models show that differences in human capital and job characteristics explain a major part of the unemployment gap between the immigrant and native workers. Interestingly, a substantial part of this gap remains unexplained and can be attributed to stigma effects which are strongly present during economic booms but disappear entirely during economic downturns. These preliminary findings contradict the common expectation that compositional and contextual factors explain the unemployment gap across migrant groups, while they suggest that much of this gap is more likely related to employers’ group-prejudices and preferences that vary strongly with the economic context.

mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";color:black">BIO

color:black">Dr Irma Mooi-Reci is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She was previously an Assistant Professor of Social Research Methodology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Irma’s research interests involve poverty, unemployment and employment inequalities. Her recent work appeared in Social Forces, European Sociological Review, Journal of Criminal Justice, British Journal of Industrial Relations and Social Politics.