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

Marco Manacorda (), Alan Manning and Jonathan Wadsworth

No 2352, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

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: immigration; wage inequality; wages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2006-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (101)

Published - updated version published as 'The Impact of Immigration on the Structure of Wages: Theory and Evidence from Britain' in Journal of the American Economic Association, 2012, 10 (1), 120 - 151

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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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