I am a DPhil candidate in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, supervised by Professor Christiaan Monden. My research focuses on migrants’ economic integration: how migrants fare in the labour market, and how the rules governing their legal status shape those outcomes. I use quantitative, quasi-experimental methods and linked administrative register data from Iceland.

My DPhil project asks how legal certainty and the design of residence permits affect migrants’ labour market outcomes. This is hard to answer because migrants who obtain permits quickly tend to differ from those who do not. To get around this, I exploit sudden changes in asylum policy and the built-in timing of residence permits, which expose similar migrants to different degrees of legal certainty. Using population-wide registers linked to immigration records, I look beyond whether migrants are employed to how they enter and move through the labour market: how quickly they find work, which jobs and employers they end up in, how often they change jobs, and what they earn.

In addition to Oxford, I am an affiliate member of the International Max Planck Research School for Population, Health, and Data Science, a part of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.

Before my DPhil, I worked at the OECD, where I authored the report Skills and Labour Market Integration of Immigrants and their Children in Iceland, and at the Border Unit of the Icelandic police, where I led risk analysis and vulnerability assessments on border management. I hold a BA in Philosophy from the University of Iceland and a Master in European Affairs from Sciences Po Paris.