Having Two Passports: The Economic Effect of Citizenship in Sweden

In the last decade several countries have changed their citizenship legislation with the primary purpose of increasing integration – especially economic integration. In the same period, a number of studies have been conducted on the effects that a change of citizenship has on employment and incomes for immigrants in some OECD countries. However, few studies focus on the fact that increasing numbers of immigrants have de facto double or multiple citizenships. This paper is an attempt to measure the effect of citizenship status by immigrants divided in three categories: automatic loss of citizenship of origin country upon voluntary acquisition of another citizenship; no automatic loss of citizenship, but renunciation of citizenship of origin country is possible; No automatic loss of citizenship and renunciation of citizenship of origin is not possible.

We employ the Swedish Longitudinal Immigrant Database (Centre for Economic Demography, Lund The database covers the time-period 1968-2001 and the study follows over 100,000 individuals over time, as long as they are in Sweden. We will also control for the common demographic and socioeconomic background factors. Moreover, the use of longitudinal data makes it possible to measure the causal effect of the change of citizenship status of an individual and at the same time to control for differences in observed and unobserved individual characteristics.