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Immigrants' Wage Performance in a Routine Biased Technological Change Era: France 1994-2012
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Immigrants' Wage Performance in a Routine Biased Technological Change Era: France 1994-2012

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Abstract

Over the period 1994-2012, immigrants’ wage growth in France has outperformed that of natives on average by more than 14 percentage points. This striking wage growth performance occurs despite similar changes in employment shares along the occupational wage ladder. In this paper we investigate the sources of immigrants’ relative wage performance focusing on the role of occupational tasks. We first show that immigrants’ higher wage growth is not driven by more favorable changes in general skills (measured by age, education and residence duration), and then investigate to what extent changes in task-specific returns to skills have contributed to the differential wage dynamics through two different channels: different changes in the valuation of skills (“price effect”) and different occupational sorting (“quantity effect”). We find that the wage growth premium of immigrants is not explained by different changes in returns to skills across occupational tasks but rather by the progressive reallocation of immigrants towards tasks whose returns have increased over time. Immigrants seem to have taken advantage of ongoing labor demand restructuring driven by globalization and technological change. In addition im- migrants’ wages have been relatively more affected by minimum wage increases, due to their higher concentration in this part of the wage distribution.

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  • Catherine Laffineur & Eva Moreno Galbis & Jeremy Tanguy & Ahmed Tritah, 2018. "Immigrants' Wage Performance in a Routine Biased Technological Change Era: France 1994-2012," AMSE Working Papers 1833, Aix-Marseille School of Economics, France.
    • Handle: RePEc:aim:wpaimx:1833
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    Cited by:

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    3. Wiedner, Jonas & Giesecke, Johannes, 2022. "Immigrant Men’s Economic Adaptation in Changing Labor Markets: Why Gaps between Turkish and German Men Expanded, 1976–2015," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 56(1), pages 176-205.
    4. Galbis, Eva Moreno, 2020. "Differences in work conditions between natives and immigrants: preferences vs. outside employment opportunities," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 130(C).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    wage dynamics; tasks; immigrants; skills;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J15 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants; Non-labor Discrimination
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
    • J61 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes

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