Frisch Centre



Immigration and Wages: Evidence from Construction

By Bratsberg, Bernt, and Oddbjørn Raaum
2010
Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration, Discussion Paper No 06/10

Abstract To identify relative wage impacts of immigration, we make use of licensing requirements in the Norwegian construction sector that give rise to exogenous variation in immigrant employment shares across trades. Individual panel data reveal substantially lower wage growth for workers in trades with rising immigrant employment than for other workers. We also find that selective attrition from the sector masks the causal wage impact unless accounted for by individual fixed effects. For low and semi-skilled workers, effects of new immigration are comparable for natives and older immigrant cohorts, consistent with perfect substitutability between native and immigrant labor within trade. Finally, we present evidence that immigration reduces price inflation, as price increases over the sample period were significantly lower in activities with growth in the immigrant share than in activities with no or small change in immigrant employment.
Project: 1222 NORFACE
   
  [Full Text PDF]



Ordering
Publications will be available in full text Adobe Acrobat PDF-files from this server. Publications printed as articles or book chapters will for copyright reasons not be availbable in full text. For some documents you may need to download version 4 of the free Acrobat Reader. Microsoft Internet Explorer has problems opening some documents. In these cases one can right click the link and choose "Save Target As", and then open the saved file directly in Adobe Acrobat.

Paper versions are available by ordering on +47-22958820, fax +47-22958825, or by email frisch@frisch.uio.no
Subscribe to our information mailinglist if you want to be noitied of new publications in one or several of our research fields.

For reports, working papers or reprints from 1998 and previous years while the Frisch Centre was SNF-Oslo, use SNFs WWW publication centre, (unfortunately only in Norwegian) or Tel: +47-55959500, Fax: +47-55959439, Post: SNF, Breiviksveien 40, N-5045 Bergen, E-mail: publikasjon@snf.no



Full Name: Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research   Address: Gaustadalléen 21, NO-0349 Oslo, Norway   Telephone: +47-22958810   E-mail: frisch@frisch.uio.no .

Updated 21.05.13, webmaster@frisch.uio.no.