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Upon arrival in the host country, immigrants undergo a fundamental identity crisis. Their ethnic identity being questioned, they can be classified into four states – assimilation, integration, separation, and marginalization. This is suggested by the ethnosizer, a newly established measure to parameterize a person's ethnic identity, using individual information on language, culture, societal interaction, history of migration, and ethnic self-identification. In what state individuals end up varies among immigrants even from the same country. Moreover, the quest for ethnic identity affects women and men differentially. This paper contends that ethnic identity can significantly affect the attachment to and performance of immigrants in the host country labor market, beyond human capital and ethnic origin characteristics. Empirical estimates for immigrants in Germany show that ethnic identity is important for the decision to work and significantly and differentially affects the labor force participation of men and women. Women who exhibit the integrated identity are more likely to work than women who are German assimilated; this does not hold for men. However, once we control for selection in the labor market and a slew of individual and labor market characteristics, ethnic identity does not significantly affect the earnings of men or women immigrant workers.

The purpose of this paper is to study opinions and attitudes towards immigrants and minorities and their interactions with other barriers to minorities' economic integration. Specifically, the minority experts' own perceptions about these issues, the veracities and repercussions of unfavorable attitudes of natives are to be considered.

Employing newly available data from the IZA Expert Opinion Survey 2007 main trends in the integration situation of ethnic minorities in Europe are depicted in a comparative manner.

Robust findings show that: ethnic minorities face integration problems; natives' general negative attitudes are a key factor of their challenging situation; discrimination is acknowledged as the single most important integration barrier; low education and self‐confidence as well as cultural differences also hinder integration; minorities want change and that it comes about by policies based on the principle of equal treatment.

Future research should not only investigate how negative attitudes are formed but also study their dynamics with respect to integration policies.

Well‐designed integration policies, that take the specific situation of the respective ethnic minority into account, are persistent and enforcement of anti‐discrimination laws is desirable.

Using a unique dataset, the innovative study is the first to gauge the perspectives of expert stakeholders and ethnic minorities on their integration situation and the main barriers that hinder it.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new field and suggest a new research agenda.

Combine ethnicity, migration and international relations into a new thinking. Provide a typology of diaspora and a thorough evaluation of its role and the roles of the home and host countries.

Diaspora economics is more than a new word for migration economics. It opens a new strand to political economy. Diaspora is perceived to be a well-defined group of migrants and their offspring with a joined cultural identity and ongoing identification with the country or culture of origin. This implies the potential to undermine the nation-state. Diasporas can shape policies in the host countries.

Provide a new understanding of global human relations.

The purpose of this paper is to study the determinants of naturalization of non‐EU immigrant household heads with a fresh look at the role of integration and ethnicity.

Employing data on immigrant household heads from the German Socioeconomic Panel differentiation is made among those who already have been naturalized, those who plan to take citizenship, and those who do not have citizenship and do not want it, using multinomial probit models. The subject scope includes literature on naturalization, ethnicity, and integration.

A robust finding is that German citizenship is very valuable to female immigrant household heads and the generally better educated, but not to those educated in Germany. The degree of integration into German society has a differential effect on citizenship acquisition. While a longer residence in Germany has a negative influence on actual or future naturalization, arriving at a younger age and having close German friends are strong indicators of a positive proclivity to citizenship acquisition. Likewise, ethnic origins and religion also influence these decisions. Muslim immigrants in Germany are more willing to become German citizens than non‐Muslim immigrants, but there are also fewer German citizens among Muslims than among non‐Muslims.

Future research should also investigate the second‐generation naturalization proclivities and those of illegals.

Allowing for dual citizenship helps generate more naturalizations among Muslims.

The paper provides a test of the relative importance of the integration approach in comparison with the ethnicity model; demonstrating that integration in German society has a stronger effect on naturalization than ethnic origin and religion.

The purpose of this paper is to study the determinants of wages and the labor market success of two kinds of entrepreneurial women in Germany: self‐employed and salaried businesswomen, and investigate whether ethnicity is important in these challenging jobs.

Using Lee's technique, the paper first estimates the probabilities of being in self‐employment, a salaried businesswoman, working in other non‐entrepreneurial jobs, and not working at all with a multinomial logit, and accordingly adjust the wage regressions for selection and heteroscedasticity. By employing data from the German Socio‐economic Panel one can differentiate among different types of self‐employment and business entrepreneurship, control for human capital and labor market structures, and estimate wages for native and immigrant women aged 20 to 65. The subject scope includes literature on entrepreneurship, self‐employment, gender‐edge, and immigrant earnings assimilation.

Self‐employment offers businesswomen a lucrative avenue with higher monetary rewards, albeit for a shorter spell. If salaried businesswomen went into self‐employment, they would receive considerably higher wages and for at least 30 years. However, if self‐employed businesswomen went into salaried jobs, their wages would decline. This suggests that it is the self‐employment sector that offers better opportunities and monetary success, but not many businesswomen go into it. In these two entrepreneurial outlets human capital, years‐since‐migration and ethnicity are not significant.

Future research should overcome the cross‐sectional limitation and take advantage of the panel aspect.

Many qualified, highly educated and talented women are not part of the labor market and the entrepreneurial world. Germany should encourage these women to work, as it needs skilled workers and a stronger entrepreneurial sector. Financial disparities still exist between West and East Germany.

The novelty comes from asserting that the entrepreneurial spirit can also exist in salaried jobs. The added value is the new empirical evidence on the importance of self‐employment in Germany, where women fare well and success does not depend on ethnicity.

This paper seeks to shed further light on the native‐migrant differences in economic outcomes. The aim is to investigate labor market reintegration, patterns of job search, and reservation wages across unemployed migrants and natives in Germany.

The paper is based on the IZA Evaluation Dataset, a recently collected rich survey of a representative sample of entrants into unemployment in Germany. The data include a large number of migration variables, allowing us to adapt a recently developed concept of ethnic identity: the ethnosizer. The authors analyze these data using the OLS technique as well as probabilistic regression models.

The results indicate that separated migrants have a relatively slow reintegration into the labor market. It can be argued that this group exerts a relatively low search effort and that it has reservation wages which are moderate, yet still above the level which would imply similar employment probabilities as other groups of migrants.

The findings indicate that special attention needs to be paid by policy makers to various forms of social and cultural integration, as it has significant repercussions on matching in the labor market.

The paper identifies a previously unmapped relationship between ethnic identity and labor market outcomes.