In Europe, the children of migrants often have worse economic outcomes than those with local-born parents. This paper shows that children born in Denmark with immigrant parents (first-generation locals) have lower earnings, higher unemployment, less education, more welfare transfers, and more criminal convictions than children with local-born parents. However, when we condition on parental socioeconomic characteristics, first-generation locals generally perform as well or slightly better than the children of locals. While children of immigrants are more likely to come from deprived backgrounds, they do not experience substantially different outcomes conditional on parental background.

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3 July 2025

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American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 17(3) , pp.347-349, 2025

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DOI: 10.1257/app.20230389

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20230389

This Journal article is published under the centre's Labour programme.

This publication comes under the following theme: Work and wellbeing