Regulating Labor Immigration: The Effects of Lifting Labor Market Testing

Working Papers 344 Jeremias Nieminen, Sanni Kiviholma, Ohto Kanninen, Hannu Karhunen

Abstract

We study the effects of lifting labor market testing (LMT) requirements for non-EU workers in Finland utilizing regional variation in occupations exempted from labor market testing. We use individual and firm-level administrative data from 2011–2020 and hand-collected data on local changes in labor market testing rules since 2012. We estimate the effects using a staggered difference-in-differences design. We find that lifting the LMT requirement leads to an increase in the inflow of non-EU workers to treated occupation-regions. A further breakdown of this inflow shows that the effect is mainly driven by non-EU individuals already in Finland. In five years, treatment effect on the annual earnings of natives is -€647 (around 2%) at the occupation-region level and -€1,121 (around 4%) at the individual level. The observed earnings effects, especially at the occupation-region level, are driven by low-wage and service-oriented occupations. Despite the negative effects on earnings, we observe positive employment effects for some incumbent worker groups at the individual level. Conversely, at the occupation-region level, there is an increase in the number of job seekers in the exempted occupations. At the firm level, we observe an increase in the number of non-EU employees and suggestive evidence of firms expanding in general.