A Meta-Analytic Assessment of the Effect of Immigration on Wages

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

June 30, 2005

Abstract:

In our increasingly interconnected and open world, international migration is becoming an important socio-economic phenomenon for many countries. Since the early 1980s, many studies have been undertaken of the impact of immigration on host labour markets. Borjas (2003) noted that the estimated effect of immigration on the wage of native workers varies widely from study to study and sometimes even within the same study. In addition, these effects cluster around zero. Such a small effect is a rather surprising outcome, given that in a closed competitive labour market an increase in labour supply may be expected to exert a downward pressure on wages.

We revisit this issue by applying meta-analytic techniques to a set of eighteen papers, which altogether generated 348 estimates of the percentage change in the wage of a native worker with respect to a one percentage point increase in the ratio of immigrants over native workers. While many studies in our database employ US data, estimates are also obtained from Germany, The Netherlands, France, Norway, Austria, Israel and Australia. Our analysis shows that results vary across countries and are inter alia related to the type of modelling approach. Technical issues such as publication bias and quality of the estimates are addressed as well.

Published in

Journal of Economic Surveys

Volume and page numbers

Volume: 19 , p.451 -477

ISSN

9500804

Link

- http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0950-0804

Notes

Held online ASL - http://serlib0.essex.ac.uk/record=b1599644~S5

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