Task Specialization, Wage, and Immigration in Canada

Shiyu Jiang ()
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Shiyu Jiang: School of Public Finance and Taxation, Nanjing University of Finance and Economics

Annals of Economics and Finance, 2021, vol. 22, issue 2, 389-420

Abstract: This paper uses Canadian census data to undertake research on the effects of immigration on employees’ performance in the Canadian labor market. By generating a new method to define communication and manual tasks, this paper concentrates on changes in task supplies in the labor market resulting from changes in immigration to Canada. This paper also studies the effects of a change in the foreign-born worker share on task compensations. In this paper, the Canadian labor market is separated into two groups based on workers' educational attainments, and these two groups have different reactions to an increase in the share of immigrant workers in the labor market. Using a regression model, I estimate compensations for communication and manual tasks respectively to study how relative compensation variation is affected by the foreign-born worker share. I find some important evidence of immigration effects on the Canadian labor market, and these effects vary across metropolitan areas and years. The increase in the foreign born share will lead both the relative supply of communication versus manual tasks (C/M) and the relative compensations of these tasks (Wc/Wm) to go up in the highly-educated workers group. However, the Canadian immigration does not impact the less-educated group quite significantly because of the smaller size of this group in the labor market.

Keywords: Immigration; Relative wage differences; Task specialization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 J15 J24 J3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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