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This paper studies how the introduction of a novel residence permit for working purposes – the so-called Blue Card introduced in August 2012 – has affected entry-level wages of non-EU migrants in Germany. The Blue Card was targeted at non-EU university graduates with degrees received or recognized in Germany. It provided immediate residence to students with a working contract that pays above clearly-announced and regularly-updated wage thresholds. We leverage a difference-in-difference approach and unique data on national and international graduates in Germany between 2011-2014. We find that the introduction of the Blue Card increases entry-level wages of non-EU graduates relative to the control group by approximately 2 percent of the pre-treatment entry-level wages. We provide suggestive evidence that these results are not driven by more or better-quality non-EU graduates staying in Germany, but rather because the Blue Card wage threshold acts as a reference point.

Like many other countries, Germany has experienced rapid population and workforce ageing, yet with substantial variation across regions. In this paper we first use this spatial variation between 1975 and 2014 to estimate quasi- causal supply effects of ageing on regional labour market outcomes, drawing on the identification strategy of Böhm and Siegel (2020). We find in our panel of German labour market regions that workforce mean age has considerable negative effects on the wage returns to age. We also obtain suggestive evidence that relative employment rates of older workers decline when mean age rises. A decomposition of the heterogeneous regional trends using our estimates shows that ageing of rural regions is mainly driven by supply (reflecting local population dynamics) whereas urban ageing is driven by demand (reflecting responses to economic conditions). We discuss the differential implications of these drivers for regional policy.