Rural or urban origins: economic assimilation of Turkish and Iranian immigrants in Sweden, 1968-2001

Siddartha Aradhya, Lund University

This paper aims to address this gap in our knowledge, by examining two comparatively disadvantaged groups in the labor market, combining it with unique information pertaining to the individual’s pre-migration experience. More specifically, we examine a sample of immigrants from Turkey and Iran, arriving in Sweden between 1968 and 1994, and followed until 2001, using the Swedish Longitudinal Immigrant database (SLI). The uniqueness of the paper comes from the data containing information on the individual’s place of birth, implying that we can differentiate geographically between individuals originating from the same country of birth, the level of aggregation typically encountered in existing research. Thereby, using GIS software, we are able to account for within-country-of-origin differences in population density and level of economic development, potentially relevant determinants of labor market outcomes after arrival in Sweden