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

Marco Manacorda (), Alan Manning () and Jonathan Wadsworth
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Marco Manacorda: Department of Economics, QMUL - CEP, LSE and CEPR

No 608, CReAM Discussion Paper Series from Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM), Department of Economics, University College London

Abstract: Immigration to the UK has risen over time. Existing studies of the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers in the UK have failed to find any significant effect. This is something of a puzzle since Card and Lemieux, (2001) have shown that changes in the relative supply of educated natives do seem to have measurable effects on the wage structure. This paper offers a resolution of this puzzle – natives and immigrants are imperfect substitutes, so that an increase in immigration reduces the wages of immigrants relative to natives. We show this using a pooled time series of British cross-sectional micro data of observations on male wages and employment from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s. This lack of substitution also means that there is little discernable effect of increased immigration on the wages of native-born workers, but that the only sizeable effect of increased immigration is on the wages of those immigrants who are already here.

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, nep-ltv and nep-mig
Date: Written
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http://www.econ.ucl.ac.uk/cream/pages/CDP/CDP_08_06.pdf (application/pdf)

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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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:crm:wpaper:0608

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