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Internships during tertiary education have become substantially more common over the past decades in many industrialised countries. This study examines the impact of a voluntary intra-curricular internship experience during university studies on the probability of being invited to a job interview. To estimate a causal relationship, we conducted a randomised field experiment in which we sent 1248 fictitious, but realistic, resumes to real job openings. We find that applicants with internship experience have, on average, a 12.6% higher probability of being invited to a job interview.
Labour market entry poses enormous challenges for recently arrived refugees, ranging from language barriers, devaluation of human capital, unfamiliarity with customs of the job search process to outright discrimination. How can refugees overcome these challenges and quickly enter gainful employment? In this paper, we draw on interviews with 26 male and female refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, conducted in 2017 and 2018, who came to Austria in 2015 and 2014 and who have successfully entered employment. We depict refugees’ own perspectives on and strategies for fast job entry and integration. Personal agency and a proactive approach of seeking and seizing opportunities are key for overcoming initial barriers and entering upon positive integration pathways. At the same time, refugees’ personal agency is essential for establishing social ties to the host society, which also play a crucial role in early labour market integration. Finally, institutions of the Austrian labour market (the ‘apprenticeship’-system) interact with refugees’ agency in most intricate ways, both setting up nearly insurmountable barriers but also providing specific opportunities for refugees.
Against a background of increasing violence against non-natives, we estimate the effect of hate crime on refugees’ mental health in Germany. For this purpose, we combine two datasets: administrative records on xenophobic crime against refugee shelters by the Federal Criminal Office and the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees. We apply a regression discontinuity in time design to estimate the effect of interest. Our results indicate that hate crime has a substantial negative effect on several mental health indicators, including the Mental Component Summary score and the Patient Health Questionnaire-4 score. The effects are stronger for refugees with closer geographic proximity to the focal hate crime and refugees with low country-specific human capital. While the estimated effect is only transitory, we argue that negative mental health shocks during the critical period after arrival have important long-term consequences. Keywords: Mental health, hate crime, migration, refugees, human capital.
The paper sheds some light on the education returns in Germany in the post war period. After describing higher education in Germany the current stand of higher education financing within the single states is presented. In six states tuition fees will be introduced in 2007/08 and discussions are going on in even some more. In the second part of the paper an empirical analysis is done using longitudinal data from the German social pension system. The analysis over the whole lifecycle renders results which proof that the higher education advantages are quite remarkable and might be a justification for more intensified financing by tuition fees. But all this has to be embedded into an encompassing strategy of tax and social policy, especially to prevent a strengthened process of social selection, which would be counterproductive for an increased and highly qualified human capital in Germany.