Cultural Diversity and Local Labour Markets

Suedekum J., Wolf K. and Blien U. Cultural diversity and local labour markets, Regional Studies. The diversity of nationalities of foreign workers in the German labour market has increased considerably over the period 1995–2006. This paper investigates the effects of this diversity for native employees at the local level. The higher is high-skilled foreign employment, the higher are local wages and employment levels for natives. These effects are reinforced the more diverse is the group of high-skilled foreigners. For low-skilled foreigners benefits from diversity are also found, but only conditional on the overall size of this group. These results suggest that cultural diversity benefits native workers by raising local productivity.