Childhood immigration, skill specialization, and worker sorting

Childhood immigrants face developmental constraints related to the acquisition of skills required to succeed in advanced economies. We study how age at arrival shapes earnings potential, worker productivity, and labor market sorting. Drawing on administrative data from Norway, we employ a sibling comparison design to identify the effects of age at arrival on a broad set of adult labor market outcomes. Our analysis shows that later arrival has progressively negative effects across the earnings distribution—although concentrated among low earners; increases sorting into physically demanding occupations with lower communicative, socioemotional, and math–logic skill requirements; reduces full-time work; and lowers access to high-paying employers. A formal decomposition indicates that differences in educational qualifications, work hours, and sorting into math–logic intensive occupations are key mediators of the age-at-arrival effect on earnings. Together, these findings document how immigration at later developmental stages has lasting consequences for skill specialization and economic assimilation. For childhood immigrants, even modest delays in country-specific human capital acquisition can lead to misalignment between their skills and the productivity demands and reward structures of knowledge-intensive labor markets.