Estimation of Production Functions using Average Data

2008

Labour Economics, 2012

Life cycle wages of immigrants from developing countries fall short of catching up with wages of natives. This disparity reflects both lower wages at entry and lower wage growth. Using linked employer-employee data, we show that 40 percent of the native-immigrant wage gap is explained by differential sorting across establishments. Our findings point to differences in job mobility and intermittent spells of unemployment as major sources of the discrepancy in lifetime wages. The inferior wage growth of immigrants primarily results from failure to advance to higher paying establishments over time. This pattern is consistent with statistical discrimination in hiring but not with monopsonistic discrimination due to informational frictions. *We are grateful for helpful comments from seminar and conference participants at

RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2021

We study the role of firm productivity in explaining earnings disparities between immigrants and natives using population-wide matched employer-employee data from Sweden. We find substantial earnings returns to working in firms with higher persistent productivity, with greater gains for immigrants from non-Western countries. Moreover, the pass-through of within-firm productivity variation to earnings is stronger for immigrants in low-productive, immigrant-dense firms. But immigrant workers are underrepresented in high-productive firms and less likely to move up the productivity distribution. Thus, sorting into less productive firms decreases earnings in poor-performing immigrant groups that would gain the most from working in high-productive firms.

Economics Letters, 1995

In this paper we study earnings determination at the firm level in Austria. We distinguish firms who employ immigrant workers and those who do not. By using a switching regressions model we find that native workers in firms with immigrant employees face rising earnings-tenure profiles whereas natives in other firms do not.

Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 2007

2009

We study potential economic benefits of immigration stemming from two factors: first, that immigrants bring not only their labor supply w ith them, but also their consumption demands; and second, that immigrants may have a comparative advantage in the production of ethnic goods. Using data on the universe of busines s establishments located in California between 1992 and 2002 matched with Census of Population data, we find some evidence that immigrant inflows boost employment in the retail se ctor, which is non-traded and a nonintensive user of immigrant labor. We find that imm igration is associated with fewer stand-alone retail stores, and a greater number of large and in particular big-box retailers ‐ evidence that likely contradicts a diversity-enhancing effect of immigration. On the other hand, focusing more sharply on the restaurant sector, for which we can better identify the types of products consumed by customers, the evidence indicates that immigrati on is associated with ...

2016

Abstract: Many developed countries have recently experienced a significant inflow of immigrants in the agricultural sector. At the same time, the sector is still in a process of structural transformation resulting in fewer but bigger and presumably more efficient farms. In this paper, we exploit detailed matched employer-employee data for the entire population of Danish farms to analyze the micro-level relationship between these two developments. We find that farms that employ immigrants tend to be both larger and pay higher wages. Furthermore, farm survival and job creation are both positively affected by the use of (especially Eastern European) immigrants, and this does not happen at the expense of the already employed (native) workers.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

To what extent do immigrants and the native-born work in separate workplaces? Do worker and employer characteristics explain the degree of workplace concentration? We explore these questions using a matched employer-employee database that extensively covers employers in selected MSAs. We find that immigrants are much more likely to have immigrant coworkers than are natives, and are particularly likely to work with their compatriots. We find much higher levels of concentration for small businesses than for large ones, that concentration varies substantially across industries, and that concentration is particularly high among immigrants with limited English skills. We also find evidence that neighborhood job networks are strongly positively associated with concentration. The effects of networks and language remain strong when type is defined by country of origin rather than simply immigrant status. The importance of these factors varies by immigrant country of origin-for example, not speaking English well has a particularly strong association with concentration for immigrants from Asian countries. Controlling for differences across MSAs, we find that observable employer and employee characteristics account for about half of the difference between immigrants and natives in the likelihood of having immigrant coworkers, with differences in industry, residential segregation and English speaking skills being the most important factors.

Social science research, 2021

Advanced labor markets are typically stratified by origin with a majority ethnic group occupying more desirable (high-skilled) positions and subordinated ethnic minorities occupying less desirable (low-skilled) positions. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether employer recruitment choices reinforce these patterns. This would be the case if employers were more reluctant to hire subordinate minority job applicants for high-skilled positions than for low-skilled occupations. We use experimental correspondence audit data derived from 6407 job applications sent to job openings in the Swedish labor market, where the 'foreignness' of the job applicants has been randomly assigned to otherwise equally merited job applications. We find that negative discrimination of job applicants with 'foreign' names is very similar in the high-skilled and low-skilled segments of the labor market. There is no significant relative ethnic difference in chances of callbacks by skill le...

2006

This paper studys the determinants of earnings among foreign workers in Portugal. We use data from a matched employer-employee dataset that covers all wage-earners in the Portuguese economy. Despite the caveats inherent to the use of cross-sectional data, this type of dataset allows us to study the importance of the workplace as a determinant of the economic progress of immigrants. We find evidence of promotions being used to reallocate foreign workers within matches, indicating that occupational upgrading takes place with or without job switching. "Ethnic goods" in the workplace are also important determinants of immigrants' earnings. This result translates to the workplace the importance of ethnic concentration in residential areas previously documented in the literature. Quantile regression shows that the wage disadvantage of immigrants varies enormously along the wage distribution (it is null at the right tail, and maximum at the 3 rd decile). At the left-tail of the wage distribution, foreign workers are effectively protected by minimum wage provisions. Returns to schooling and country-of-origin effects also vary along the wage distribution.