Does Immigration Raise Blue and White Collar Wages of Natives?

Stefano Staffolani and Enzo Valentini

No 330, Working Papers from Universita' Politecnica delle Marche (I), Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali

Abstract: This paper analyses theoretically and empirically the effects of immigration on the wage rate of native workers. Empirical literature rarely finds that immigration generates a fall in the wages of manual workers. The theoretical model presented in this paper justifies those results, by hypothesizing an economic system where advanced firms buy an intermediate good from traditional firms, which employ manual workers in both clean and dirty tasks, the latter being more disliked by native workers. We conclude that native skilled wages always increase whereas native unskilled wages can both increase or decrease with immigration. An empirical analysis of the Italian labour market follows, showing that all native workers' wages rise with immigration.

Keywords: Migrations; Wage Equation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 J61 J82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17
Date: 2009-01
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 (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://docs.dises.univpm.it/web/quaderni/pdf/330.pdf First version, 2009 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:anc:wpaper:330

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Universita' Politecnica delle Marche (I), Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Maurizio Mariotti ().