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Title: Honey, Routinization Shrunk My Wage! Native-Immigrant Wage Gaps and the Growing Importance of Social Skills

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2017

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Abstract: The gap between native and immigrant wages in the U.S. has increased significantly since the 1980s. While part of this may be attributable to declines in the relative quality of immigrant labor, this paper explores whether the growing importance of social skills also played a role. Using historical routine employment share to measure cities’ likely technology adoption and its process of replacing routine labor, I show that local labor markets that specialized in routine tasks experienced differential increases in native-immigrant wage gaps. This is consistent with the hypothesis that native workers have a comparative advantage in U.S.-specific social skills, and the returns to these skills have increased as a result of technology replacing routine labor. Results do not seem to be driven by selective migration between cities but are strongly related to immigrants’ English language abilities as well as other measures of their social assimilation.

Url: http://conference.iza.org/conference_files/MacroEcon_2018/song_t21483.pdf

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Authors: Song, Tao

Publisher: The University of the South

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Migration and Immigration

Countries: United States