Immigrant and native-born earnings distributions in australia: 1982-1996

Abstract

The earnings distributions of immigrant full-time employees are contrasted with those of native-born full-time employees using data from ABS income surveys spanning the period 1982 to 1996-7. A semi-parametric procedure developed by DiNardo, Fortin and Lemieux (1996) is used to analyse the roles played by changes in the wage structure versus changes in the skill composition of workers in explaining the distributional changes over the period. It is found that earnings dispersion increased to a greater extent for immigrants than for natives, an outcome which is not explicable by changes in the observed skills of immigrants. A relative decline in mean earnings of female new arrivals is also ide..