Expats and the firms they work in

This report investigates the role of firms in generating skills mobility. Combining Danish firm- and individual-level register data, we explore firms’ use of foreign highly skilled labour in Denmark in two different analyses. We refer to foreign employees working in a job within one of the first three major International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) groups (i.e. managers, professionals, technicians and associate professionals) as expats, and the firms that employ them as expat firms.

The first analysis explores the relationship between skill flows and production. We compare production characteristics for firms recruiting skilled workers from abroad to firms that do not recruit such workers. Moreover, we examine how firms use highly skilled international workers relative to native workers within the firms.

The second analysis in this report is a comparison of small and large firms that recruit expats. We have very little systematic evidence for why and how small firms recruit skills from abroad; this report is a first and innovative attempt to address this gap in the literature and to explore the role that small firms play in global skills mobility. We differentiate between large companies with 250 employees or more and small companies with more than 10 but fewer than 250 employees.

Read the report "Expats and the firms they work in" by Mette Foged, Nana W. Hansen and Natnael S. Nigatu