May 2022

IZA DP No. 15310: Intergenerational Spillovers of Integration Policies: Evidence from Finland's Integration Plans

This version: August 2024, forthcoming in: the Review of Economics and Statistics

We examine the intergenerational effects of an integration program that increased language training and improved labor market outcomes of adult immigrants in Finland. Exploiting a discontinuity in the phase-in rule of a reform, we find that parents' participation in the program improved their children's grades by 0.5 standard deviations and extended their educational attainment by over a year. Two decades post-arrival, children of the affected immigrants earned 42% more than their counterparts whose parents narrowly missed the policy's implementation.