The Impact of Immigration on the Structure of Male Wages: Theory and Evidence from Britain

Marco Manacorda, Alan Manning () and Jonathan Wadsworth

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: Immigration to the UK has risen in the past 10 years and has had a measurable effect on thesupply of different types of labour. But, existing studies of the impact of immigration on thewages of native-born workers in the UK (e.g. Dustmann, Fabbri and Preston, 2005) have failedto find any significant effect. This is something of a puzzle since Card and Lemieux, (2001) haveshown that changes in the relative supply of educated natives do seem to have measurable effectson the wage structure. This paper offers a resolution of this puzzle - natives and immigrants areimperfect substitutes, so that an increase in immigration reduces the wages of immigrantsrelative to natives. We show this using a pooled time series of British cross-sectional micro dataof observations on male wages and employment from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s. This lackof substitution also means that there is little discernable effect of increased immigration on thewages of native-born workers.

Keywords: Wages; wage inequality; immigration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
Date: Written
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Related works:
Working Paper: The Impact of Immigration on the Structure of Male Wages: Theory and Evidence from Britain (2006)
Working Paper: The Impact of Immigration on the Structure of Male Wages: Theory and Evidence from Britain (2006)
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