Income from work among immigrants in Sweden

This paper uses a two-step Heckman approach to investigate to what extent there are differences in income from work between immigrants and natives in Sweden. Contrary to previous studies this study takes the selection effect, i.e. the probability of having an income from work, into account when calculating the effect on income from work of a change in any of the explanatory variables. Our study shows that when the selection effect is taken into account, the differences in income from work between immigrants and natives are smaller than when the selection effect is not considered. We find that immigrants have a lower income from work than the native population when we control for variables such as schooling, experience, civil status and region of residence. Furthermore, immigrant cohorts with a recent year of immigration have a considerably lower income from work than earlier immigrant cohorts.