Immigrants' Wage Performance in a Routine Biased Technological Change Era: France 1994-2012
Jérémy Tanguy  1, *@  , Ahmed Tritah  2@  , Eva Moreno Galbis  3@  , Catherine Laffineur  4@  
1 : Institut de Recherche en Gestion et en Economie  (IREGE)
Université Savoie Mont Blanc
Université Savoie Mont Blanc 4, chemin de Bellevue B.P. 80439 74944 Annecy-le-Vieux Cedex -  France
2 : Groupe d'Analyse des Itinéraires et des Niveaux Salariaux  (GAINS)
Université du Maine : EA2167
3 : Groupement de Recherche en Économie Quantitative d'Aix-Marseille  (GREQAM)
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Ecole Centrale de Marseille
GREQAM, Château de Lafarge, Route des Milles, 13290 Les Milles -  France
4 : Groupe de Recherche en Droit, Economie et Gestion  (GREDEG)
CNRS : UMR7321, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis (UNS), Université Nice Sophia Antipolis [UNS]
250, Rue Albert Einstein 06560 Valbonne -  France
* : Corresponding author

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 immigrants' 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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