Background Matters, but not Whether Parents are Immigrants: Outcomes of Children Born in Denmark

Abstract

In Europe, the children of migrants often have worse economic outcomes than those with local-born parents. This paper shows that children born in Denmark with immigrant parents (first-generation locals) have lower earnings, higher unemployment, less education, more welfare transfers, and more criminal convictions than children with local-born parents. However, when we condition on parental socio-economic characteristics, first-generation locals generally perform as well or slightly better than the children of locals. While children of immigrants are more likely to come from deprived backgrounds, they do not experience substantially different outcomes conditional on parental background.