Comparing the Immigrant-Native Pay Gap: A Novel Evidence from Home and Host Countries

Andrej Cupak, Pavel Ciaian and d'Artis Kancs

No 810, LIS Working papers from LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg

Abstract: We estimate wage differentials between foreign- and native-born workers across developed and developing economies. We leverage internationally harmonised microdata covering 21 countries, 20 years and 1.5 million individuals and employ counterfactual decomposition techniques. We find that vis-à-vis comparable workers born in developed countries, the workers born in developing economies are disadvantaged both in their home country labour markets and – if migrating – also in developed host countries. Wage differentials suggest the opposite for workers born in developed countries – their wages are higher not only in developed countries but for migrants also in developing host countries. After accounting for personal and job-related characteristics, at least 28% of the total native-to-migrant wage gap remains unexplained. The unexplained wage gap has increased during the last decade and can be attributed to the labour market discrimination, differences in unobserved job characteristics, variation in unobserved skills, and the institutional labour market framework.

JEL-codes: D31 J15 J7 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2021-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-isf and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lisdatacenter.org/wps/liswps/810.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Comparing the immigrant-native pay gap: A novel evidence from home and host countries (2023)
Working Paper: Comparing the immigrant-native pay gap: A novel evidence from home and host countries (2021)
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:lis:liswps:810

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LIS Working papers from LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Piotr Paradowski ().