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

By Marco Manacorda, Alan Manning, Jonathan Wadsworth. Social Science Research Network, 2006

641 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5f4c174d11724ca44076626d572c97fa3fd2bb0c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

What can wages and employment tell us about the UK's productivity puzzle? (2013, background): “Thereis,however,relativelylittleevidencethathigherimmigra-tionhasleadtoareductioninwagesamongthenative-bornpopulation(Dustmann et al. , 2005; Manacorda et al. , 2012) and some suggestion that the effect on average wages might even have been positive (Dustmann et al. , 2013). the characteristics we…”
EU Enlargement and Migration: Assessing the Macroeconomic Impacts (2010, positive): “An alternative explanation is that immigrants are imperfect substitutes for native workers (Manacorda et al., 2006).”
Openness and income: The roles of trade and migration (2014, background): “In comparison FR had only 3,220 bilateral trade flows and Noguer and Siscart (2005) had 8,906.”
Immigration, public opinion and the recession in Europe (2016, result): “There has been a lively debate about the impact of immigration across education/experience groups, with mixed results (Ottaviano and Peri, 2012; IMMIGRATION AND PUBLIC OPINION 23 Manacorda et al., 2012).”
Migration and Wage‐setting: Reassessing the Labor Market Effects of Migration* (2011, positive): “In another strand of the empirical literature, the wage effects of migration are derived from an aggregate production function approach (Grossmann, 1992; Borjas, 2003; Manacorda et al., 2006; Ottaviano and Peri, 2006, 2008; Dustmann et al., 2008).”
The Effect of Immigration along the Distribution of Wages (2013, background): “The wage of any skill type is decreased by immigration if and only if the intensity of immigration at that point in the distribution of types exceeds an 8 All discussion below covers the full range for possible values for θ , and is therefore compatible with Ottaviano and Peri’s (2006) observation t”
The Impact of the Recent Migration from Eastern Europe on the UK Economy (2007, positive): “Manacorda et al (2006) find evidence that natives and immigrants in the UK are imperfect substitutes, like Ottaviano and Peri (2005, 2006) for the US.”