How does the presence of immigrant coworkers shape the likelihood that minority employees stay or leave their jobs? This study uses linked employer–employee administrative data covering the entire Norwegian labor market to investigate how workplace immigrant concentration influences turnover among immigrants and their native-born children. Building on theories of organizational demography, we ask whether working alongside a higher share of immigrant-background coworkers fosters employee retention—consistent with mechanisms of social contact and homophily—or instead prompts workplace exit, as suggested by group threat and competition theories. Our findings reveal that greater representation of immigrant-background coworkers significantly reduces turnover among immigrants, especially when contact occurs within same-skill occupations. The exposure effects reducing the likelihood of workplace exit are also stronger when immigrant-background employees share the same national origin with their minority coworkers and when minorities are better represented among top earners in the organization. For children of immigrants, the effects of coworker composition are weaker, consistent with theories of assimilation and the weakening of ethnic boundaries across generations. Taken together, these results support social contact theories, which claim that a more inclusive work environment and coworker support in more ethnically diverse workplace contexts foster organizational attachment and reduce turnover among immigrant-background minority employees. However, minority employees’ increased retention in organizations with higher immigrant concentration may also reinforce patterns of ethnic workplace segregation.

Childhood immigrants face developmental constraints related to the acquisition of skills required to succeed in advanced economies. We study how age at arrival shapes earnings potential, worker productivity, and labor market sorting. Drawing on administrative data from Norway, we employ a sibling comparison design to identify the effects of age at arrival on a broad set of adult labor market outcomes. Our analysis shows that later arrival has progressively negative effects across the earnings distribution—although concentrated among low earners; increases sorting into physically demanding occupations with lower communicative, socioemotional, and math–logic skill requirements; reduces full-time work; and lowers access to high-paying employers. A formal decomposition indicates that differences in educational qualifications, work hours, and sorting into math–logic intensive occupations are key mediators of the age-at-arrival effect on earnings. Together, these findings document how immigration at later developmental stages has lasting consequences for skill specialization and economic assimilation. For childhood immigrants, even modest delays in country-specific human capital acquisition can lead to misalignment between their skills and the productivity demands and reward structures of knowledge-intensive labor markets.

We conceptualize immigrant incorporation as a categorically driven process and contrast the bright distinctions between first-generation immigrants and natives, with more blurry second-generation contrasts. We analyze linked employer-employee data of a sample of 5,097 employees in 97 large German organizations and focus on first- and second-generation immigrants. We explore how generational status in the labor market and workplace contexts expands and contracts native-immigrant wage inequalities. We find a substantial average first-generation immigrant-native wage gap, which is not explained by individual human capital differences or most aspects of organizational context. In contrast, there is, on average, no second-generation wage gap, but there are substantial variations across workplaces. A series of results confirm predictions from relational inequality theory. For both first- and second-generation immigrants, working in a high-inequality workplace is associated with larger wage gaps. Second-generation immigrants perform better in workplaces where they have intersectional advantages over natives, and for first-generation immigrants collective bargaining protection narrows wage gaps with natives. Consistent with ethnic competition theory, in workplaces with very high shares of immigrant workers, the first-generation–native wage gap is larger. In contrast, increased contact between native Germans and second-generation immigrant coworkers reduces earnings gaps, but only up to a tipping point, after which competition processes reappear and earning gaps widen.

We examine variations in pay gap estimates and inferences associated with distinct conceptualizations of jobs and employment contexts under legal and comparable worth theories of pay bias. We find that job titles produce smaller estimates of within job pay gaps than job groups, but the inferential importance of job concepts differs across organizational, workplace, and job groups within workplace units of observation. Moving from more to less job concept detail, we find almost no inference differences when pay gaps are estimated at the organizational level. Tradeoffs at the workplace and job groups within workplace levels are more common, comprising around 10 percent to 20 percent of observations. A legal theoretical framework leads to fewer empirical estimates of significant pay disparities, while comparable worth estimates suggest higher levels of gender and racial bias at the job and workplace levels. This research has implications for future analyses of linked employer-employee data and for both scientific research and regulatory enforcement of equal opportunity law.

CEO compensation has expanded dramatically over the past half-century, with network processes playing a pivotal role. We advance research on these processes by focusing on which CEOs are more likely to get pay premiums and how this shapes income going to other actors within the firm. Using Danish registry data and a weighted k-core measure of elite connections, our analyses highlight that CEOs embedded in the corporate elite can extract a substantial wage premium. These premiums are then followed by reductions in wages going back to workers over the next three years. However, the more of a firm’s board of directors who are similarly connected to the corporate elite, the less effective are those connections in generating a premium. These findings extend the role of social networks beyond just the diffusion of increasing compensation for CEOs to the creation of inequalities among CEOs and between CEOs and workers.

Why do foreign-born immigrant workers often concentrate in low-wage, minority-dense workplaces? Do immigrants’ native-born children—who typically acquire better language skills, education, and country-specific knowledge—experience improved access to workplaces in the mainstream economy? Using economy-wide linked employer–employee administrative data from Norway, we analyze both ethnic and economic workplace segregation across immigrant generations. We find that, on average, 32% of immigrants’ coworkers and 16% of second-generation immigrants’ coworkers have immigrant backgrounds, compared to 7% for natives. In terms of economic segregation, the average percentile rank of coworkers’ salaries is 36, 49, and 52 for immigrants, children of immigrants, and natives, respectively. A formal decomposition analysis shows that differences in employee, workplace, and residential location characteristics collectively explain 54–74% of ethnic and 79–84% of economic workplace segregation for immigrants and their children. Key factors driving this segregation in both immigrant generations include education, occupational attainment, industry of employment, having an immigrant manager, and the concentration of immigrant neighbors. This suggests that both skill-based sorting and network-related processes contribute to immigrant–native workplace segregation. However, children of immigrants’ improved access to less immigrant-dense and higher-paying workplaces, compared to immigrants, is primarily driven by differential skill-based sorting (i.e., higher education and shifts in occupation and industry placement). Our findings reveal a sharp decline in workplace segregation relative to natives as children of immigrants advance into the mainstream economy, highlighting the central role of assimilation in skill profiles for workplace integration across immigrant generations.