CSI’s Inequality Discussion Groups bring together Cornell faculty and graduate students from around campus to discuss and improve their in-progress research.

Title: Double or Nothing: Receiving State Legal Protections and Immigrant Labor Market Outcomes

Abstract: This paper explores whether country-level laws or policies aimed at protecting the rights and well-being of various populations result in improved labor market outcomes for foreign-born residents. In particular, we are most interested in outcomes for foreign-born female workers who are often more vulnerable to marginalization and exploitation than native-born women and all male workers. The main data for our analysis comes from the 2010 wave of the Dataset of Immigrants in OECD and non-OECD Countries (DIOC), a novel cross-sectional collection of census data containing key demographic, educational, and labor market information on millions of individual immigrants from over 200 countries of origin residing in 34 destination countries. We then add country-level controls and independent variables on domestic economic, social, and political legal protections to run multiple hierarchal linear models (individuals nested in countries) to assess whether foreign-born occupational status is directly influenced by the intensity of receiving society protections against discrimination. Our findings indicate that general anti-discrimination policies are most closely associated with better labor market outcomes for all foreign-born individuals and that specific protections against gender discrimination are necessary for optimal foreign-born female labor market outcomes.