Does Immigration Raise Blue and White Collar Wages of Natives? The Case of Italy (original) (raw)

The Immigrants Wage Gap in Italy

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

This paper investigates wage differentials between immigrants and natives in Italy along the entire wage distribution and try to account for them using information on observed characteristic of both populations. Analyses are based on data from the 2009 survey on "Income and Living Conditions of Households with Foreigners", the first nation-wide survey aimed at obtaining information on the socio-economic conditions of the foreign population living in Italy, and on the Italian sample of EU-SILC. Immigrants wage gap is disentangled according to three main dimensions: gender, immigrants length of stay in Italy and Italian language proficiency. We show the existence in the Italian labour market of a large wage differential between immigrants and natives which increases along the wage distribution suggesting the existence of a "glass ceiling effect" for immigrants workers. Moreover, we find evidence of (i) a large gender difference in the observed gap, with women showing a higher gap than men, (ii) an ongoing but largely incomplete assimilation process among the immigrant population and (iii) a lower gap for immigrants with higher language proficiency. Quantile regressions, Blinder-Oaxaca and Machado-Mata decompositions are applied. The counterfactual decomposition shows that individual characteristics account for only a small fraction of total observed differentials, sector controls increase the explained portion but do not account for the "glass ceiling" pattern of the gap, which instead disappears with occupation controls, suggesting that the upwardsloping shape of the (log) wage differential is a symptom of the occupational segregation characterizing the immigrant population in the Italian labour market. JEL Classification: J31, J61, F22.

The Role of Immigrants in the Italian Labour Market

In little more than a decade, Italy has become a country characterized by immigration from abroad. This pattern is far removed from what central-northern European countries experienced during the 1950s and the1960s. Immigration has not been explicitly demanded by employers, nor has been ruled by agreements with the immigrants. countries of origin, nor perceived as necessary for the economic system. For all these reasons, immigration has been chaotic and managed in an emergency and approximate way, even though it is deemed useful and is requested by the .informal. as well as the .official. economy. Following presentations of statistics on trends in the phenomenon, three issues are analysed: - how immigrants are integrated into a labour market that has not called them and into circumstances characterized by the absence of public policies to help them in their job search. - whether it is possible to separate regular immigration involved in the .official. market from irregular immigration in the hidden economy, considering advantages of the first and harmful effects of the second for the Italian socio-economic system. - whether it is appropriate to address complementarity between immigrant labour and the national labour force in a country with 2,500,000 unemployed workers and heavy territorial unbalances.

Working Papers Labour Market Effects of Immigration: an Empirical Analysis Based on Italian Data

Gavosto, Venturini, Villosio (1999) found that the impact of immigrants on the wage rates of natives was positive. This result has led to the present paper which analyses the effect of immigrants on native employment. Two aspects of being unemployed are considered: i) displacement risk, the probability of moving from employment into unemployment; and ii) job-search effectiveness, the probability of moving from unemployment into employment within one year. The quarterly Labour Force Survey data (ISTAT) from 1993 to 1997 are used. The transition probabilities depend on two sets of independent variables at time t: the individual’s characteristics and the external conditions of the market. A probit model is applied for repeated-cross-sections on “specific” local areas in order to check for possible autocorrelation and endogeneity. The results show that in the North of Italy, where most immigrants are located, the share of immigrants has either no effect or has a complementary effect on the probability of finding a job in the case of workers looking for a new job; while in the case of people looking for a first job (young people) the effect was negative in 1993; while it was positive in the last years. A complementary effect prevails in the case of native transition from employment to unemployment. There is a negative effect only in the manufacturing sector in Northern Italy for 1996, and this is probably due to other factors, such as the increased use of temporary contracts in that area during that year.

Do Immigrants Compete with Natives

Labour, 1999

The paper analyses the impact of foreign workers on the Italian labour market. We address the issue of whether immigrants from less developed countries are complementary or substitutes to domestic workers. We construct a data set on immigrant workers from the Administrative Social Security Archive which starts in 1986, before the general amnesty of 1990± 91, when a large share of illegal immigrants were granted working permits, and end in 1995. A two-stage procedure devised by Moulton is applied to yearly cross-sections of wages by industry and region. Our results show that the inflow of immigrants raises the wages of native manual workers (i.e. it has a complementary effect), and this effect is larger in small firms and in the north of the country. We postulate that the positive impact on native wages is due to the existence of labour constraints on the side of firms. Firms are unable to expand their output because they cannot find native workers who are willing to undertake certain (typically low-skilled) jobs. Immigrants help to fill this gap. This view is reinforced by the fact that over a`crucial threshold' of the share of foreign work (7.7 ± 12 percent) additional inflows in the labour market of foreign work have a negative effect on native wages (i.e. they compete with natives).

Immigration and manufacturing in Italy: evidence from the 2000s

Economia e Politica Industriale, 2014

This paper tests for the effect of an increase in the migration rate on manufacturing firms' performance at the local level. The model is estimated for the Italian economy during the recent years of rapid and varied migration. We construct measures for both a representative province-sector firm and a representative province firm and estimate the impact of migrants on high-and low-tech sectors by also considering migrants heterogeneity (in terms of the characteristics of origin nationalities) in order to approximate the effect of high-and low-skill migrants. Migrants' presence positively affects firm's performance: a doubling of the migration ratio to provincial population raises sales per worker by 8-9 % on average. However, this increase is unevenly distributed and favors low-tech versus high-tech sectors. On the labor supply side, low-skill (primary-educated) migrants have a higher effect on firms' performance than high-skill (tertiary-educated) migrants.

Wage assimilation: migrants versus natives

2013

BACKGROUND Italy is a country of recent foreign immigration with a long history of internal migration. Concerns about economic integration addressed in the past flows of southern natives to the north and now the international migrants, who are crucial in an ageing society. OBJECTIVE This paper studies the assimilation pattern of foreign migrants in Italy by comparing wage profiles for foreign nationals with both locals and internal migrants. Possible causes of under-assimilation are analysed by controlling for macro economic conditions at entrance into the labour market and for labour market segmentation. METHODS WHIP data are used to estimate a fixed effect model for the weekly wages of males aged 18-45. Controls for selection for return migration are introduced through a duration extension of the traditional Heckman correction term and alternatively through a hazard rate correction. RESULTS The three groups of workers start their careers at the same wage level. But, as experience increases, the wage profiles of foreigners and the two groups of natives diverge. The analysis shows that the concentration of foreign nationals in "migrant intense sectors" is the primary reason for lack of assimilation. We also find positive selection in returns for foreign workers: the more skilled are more likely to leave Italy because of the lack of opportunities in terms of career upgrading. CONCLUSIONS Under assimilation of foreign workers in the Italian labour market is essentially caused more by job segregation than by a lack of language knowledge and social capital endowment or by the macro economic conditions faced at entrance into the labour market.

Determinants of Foreign Workers' Wages in Two Italian Regions with High Illegal Immigration

Labour, 1999

Since the end of the 1970s Italy has moved from being an outmigration country to being a foreign immigration country, but very few studies have addressed the factors determining the wages of immigrant workers, owing to the lack of available data. In this paper we analyse the determinants of the wages of immigrants in some areas of Latium and Campania, where the share of illegal immigration is relatively high, using the results of a set of sample surveys which collected information on several aspects of the immigration process in the years 1993± 94. The purpose of the article is to shed some light on the factors underlying wage distribution among the immigrants using an estimation method that controls for sample selection problems. According to the empirical results, income differences seem to be relatively high among immigrants. Differences in labour market integration among sexes and area of origin clearly emerge from the results. Moreover, legal status plays an important role in the explanation of the wage gap between documented and undocumented immigrants, also because of the different occupational sector structure in the two groups. LABOUR 13 (3) 675 ± 710 (1999) JEL J31, J15 # Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999,