Why Are the Relative Wages of Immigrants Declining? A Distributional Approach

Bibliographic Data

ID4573909
AuthorsBrahim Boudarbat (Université de Montréal), Thomas Lemieux (Brahim Boudarbat is Associate Professor, École de relations industrielles, Université de Montréal. Thomas Lemieux is Professor at the Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia.)
Year2014
Volume67
Issue4
Pages1127-1165
Publication date2014-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueIndustrial and Labor Relations Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0019-7939 • E-ISSN: 2162-271X
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0019793914546298
OpenAlexW1826583789
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited15

The authors show that the decline in the relative wages of immigrants in Canada is far from homogeneous across the wage distribution. The well-documented decline in the mean wage gap between immigrants and Canadian-born workers hides a much larger decline at the low end of the wage distribution, while the gap hardly changed at the top end of the distribution. Using standard OLS regressions and unconditional quantile regressions, the authors show that both the changes in the mean wage gap and in the gap at different quantiles are well explained by standard factors such as experience, education, and country of origin of immigrants. Interestingly, an important source of change in the wages of immigrants relative to the Canadian born is the aging of the baby boom generation, which has resulted in a relative increase in the labor market experience, and thus in the wages, of Canadian-born workers relative to immigrants

Baby boom · Boom · Demographic economics · Distribution (mathematics) · Econometrics · Economics · Geography · Homogeneous · Immigration · Labour economics · Population · Quantile · Quantile regression · Real wages · Sociology · Wage · Demography · Labor market dynamics and wage inequality · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy

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