Flags and anthems: naturalisation effects on income and employment

Purpose - Even though Europe has recently undergone a difficult time and is recovering from the aftermath of prevalent unemployment, immigrants are still flocking towards Europe and taking up citizenships of their host countries through naturalisation. The purpose of this paper is to look at the how naturalised immigrants fare in terms of income and employment chances, compared to immigrants. Design/methodology/approach - Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and the 2008 European Values Study integrated data set with a final sample of 4,460 observations, this paper isolates the causal effect of naturalisation on the income and employment chances of immigrants by exploiting exogenous variations generated by the eligibility rules for naturalisation in 41 European countries. Findings - Main findings show that the probability of being naturalised increases for eligible immigrants, income and employment chances increase for eligible immigrants, and income and employment chances increase for naturalised immigrants. Research limitations/implications - This study has a data limitation, where in using the discontinuity design, there is an unbalanced number of observations to the left and right of the design’s threshold value. Originality/value - There are limited studies using causal models or potential outcome frameworks to examine the effect of immigrant naturalisation on labour market outcomes in Europe. This study fills this gap.