Immigrant wages in the public and private sectors: how do these compare to the wages of the Canadian-born?
Date
2020
Authors
Ansah, Annabella
University of Lethbridge. Faculty of Arts and Science
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Dept. of Economics
Abstract
Canada has observed wage differences between comparable immigrants and the Canadian-born across the labour market. Using the cycles of Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey from 2006 to 2018, this thesis evaluates and decomposes the wage differences between immigrants and comparable Canadian-born workers both within and between the various levels of the public sector and the private sector. Progressing from the Ordinary Least Squares estimation method, the unconditional quantile regression method is combined with the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method to evaluate these differences at the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th quantiles of the wage distribution. Within sectors, results show that the total immigrant wage gap is largest in the private sector, and the greater proportion of this gap is unexplained. Between sectors, the public-private sector wage gap is wider among the immigrant group, and most of these gaps are explained by the differences in the composition of workers in each sector.
Description
Some of the analysis presented in this thesis was conducted at the Lethbridge Branch of the Prairie Regional Research Data Centre (RDC), a part of the Canadian Research Data Centre Network. The services provided by the Lethbridge RDC are made possible through the support of the University of Lethbridge, Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Social Science and Humanity Research Council and Statistics Canada. All views expressed in this work are my own.
Keywords
Wages -- Immigrants -- Canada , Canada -- Emigration and immigration -- Economic aspects , Wages -- Canada , Income -- Canada -- Statistics , Labor market -- Canada