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.
