The impact of immigration on the structure of male wages: theory and evidence from Britain

Marco Manacorda (), Alan Manning and Jonathan Wadsworth

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Immigration to the UK has risen in the past 10 years and has had a measurable effect on the supply of different types of labour. But, existing studies of the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers in the UK (e.g. Dustmann, Fabbri and Preston, 2005) 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.

Keywords: Wages; wage inequality; immigration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2006-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (83)

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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)
Working Paper: The Impact of Immigration on the Structure of Male Wages: Theory and Evidence from Britain (2006)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:19797

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