A pervasive, yet little acknowledged feature of international migration to developed countries is that newly arriving immigrants are increasingly highly skilled since the 1980s. This paper analyses the determinants of changes in the skill composition of immigrants using a framework suggested by...

Politicians, the media, and the public express concern that immigrants depress wages by competing with native workers, but 30 years of empirical research provide little supporting evidence to this claim. Most studies for industrialized countries have found no effect on wages, on average, and...

Immigrants contribute to the economic development of the host country, but they earn less at entry and it takes many years for them to achieve parity of income. For some immigrant groups, the wage gap never closes. There is a wide variation across countries in the entry wage gap and the speed of...

Considering immigrant earnings in the context of post-arrival human capital investment implies: cohort quality should be defined in terms of the present value of the whole earnings profile; and, an appropriate definition of macro effects is obtained using the earnings profile of the native born...

Recent immigrants in Switzerland are overrepresented at the top of the wage distribution in high and at the bottom in low skill occupations. Basic economic theory thus suggests that immigration has led to a compression of the wage distribution in the former group and to an expansion in the...

In this lecture I first give an explanation for invidious preferences based on the (evolutionary) competition for resources. Then I show that these preferences have wide ranging and empirically relevant effects on labor markets, such as: workplace skill segregation, gradual promotions, wage...

Few studies in the field of labor economics have analyzed the earnings differential between formal and informal employees in urban China. Due to data limitations, previous studies on this subject have not yielded accurate and widely acceptable results. This study seeks to obtain more accurate...

Recent wage growth at the bottom of the earnings distribution in the U.S. has reversed a decades-long trend of widening wage inequality. Numerous state and local minimum wage increases have overtaken an effectively non-binding federal minimum, and robust labor demand in the post-pandemic...