Why are the Relative Wages of Immigrants Declining? A Distributional Approach

Brahim Boudarbat () and Thomas Lemieux

CLSSRN working papers from Vancouver School of Economics

Abstract: In this paper, we show that the decline in the relative wages of immigrants in Canada is far from homogenous over different points of the wage distribution. The well-documented decline in the immigrant-Canadian born mean wage gap hides a much larger decline at the low end of the wage distribution, while the gap hardly changed at the top end of the distribution. Using standard OLS regressions and new unconditional quantile regressions, we show that both the changes in the mean wage gap and in the gap at different quantiles are well explained by standard factors such as experience, education, and country of origin of immigrants. Interestingly, the most important source of change in the wages of immigrants relative to the Canadian born is the aging of the baby boom generation that has resulted in a relative increase in the labour market experience, and thus, in the wages, of Canadian born workers relative to immigrants.

Keywords: Canada; Immigration; Wages distribution; Unconditional quantile regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 J31 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2010-09-23, Revised 2010-09-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Journal Article: Why Are the Relative Wages of Immigrants Declining? A Distributional Approach (2014)
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