Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/58452 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2011
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 6058
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Using the underexplored, sizeable and long Lifetime Labour Market Database (LLMDB) we estimated the immigrant-native earnings gap across the entire earnings distribution, across continents of nationality and across cohorts of arrival in the UK between 1978 and 2006. We exploited the longitudinal nature of our data to separate the effect of observed and unobserved individual characteristics on earnings. This helped us to prevent selectivity biases such as cohort bias and survivor bias, which have been long standing unresolved identification issues in the literature. In keeping with the limited existing UK literature, we found a clear and wide dividing line between whites and non-whites in simple comparable models. However, in our more complete models we found a much narrower and subtler dividing line. This confirms the importance of accounting for unobservable individual characteristics, which is an important contribution of this paper. It also suggests that the labour market primarily rewards individual characteristics other than immigration status. We also found that the lowest paid immigrants, whom are disproportionately non-white, suffer an earnings penalty in the labour market, whereas higher paid immigrants, whom are disproportionately white, do not. Finally, we found less favourable earning gaps for cohorts that witnessed proportionately larger non-white and lower paid white immigration.
Subjects: 
immigration
wages
earnings
earnings-gap
UK
JEL: 
J24
J31
J61
J71
J82
F22
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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