The impact of immigration on occupational wages: evidence from Britain

Stephen Nickell and Jumana Saleheen

No 574, Bank of England working papers from Bank of England

Abstract: This paper asks whether immigration to Britain has had any impact on average wages. There seems to be a broad consensus among academics that the share of immigrants in the workforce has little or no effect on native wages. These studies typically have not refined their analysis by breaking it down into different occupational groups. Our contribution is to extend the existing literature on immigration to include occupations as well. We find that the immigrant to native ratio has a small negative impact on average British wages. This finding is important for monetary policy makers, who are interested in the impact that supply shocks, such as immigration, have on average wages and overall inflation. Our results also reveal that the biggest impact of immigration on wages is within the semi/unskilled services occupational group. We also investigate if there is any differential impact between immigration from the EU and non-EU, and find that there is no additional impact on aggregate UK wages as a result of migrants arriving specifically from EU countries. These findings accord well with intuition and anecdotal evidence, but have not been recorded previously in the empirical literature.

Keywords: Immigration; occupation; wages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2015-12-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-ltv and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/ ... 36249E90ECE9B597BA9C Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Impact of Immigration on Occupational Wages: Evidence from Britain (2009)
Working Paper: The impact of immigration on occupational wages: evidence from Britain (2009)
Working Paper: The impact of immigration on occupational wages: evidence from Britain (2008)
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:boe:boeewp:0574

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Bank of England working papers from Bank of England Bank of England, Threadneedle Street, London, EC2R 8AH. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Digital Media Team ().