Immigrant Downgrading : New Evidence from UK Panel Data (joint with Philip Johnson) - Economics Seminar

Event Date: 27 September 2023

Speaker: Brian Bell, Professor of Economics

Time: 4-5:15pm

Location: Please contact Rachel Hill (r.hill@strath.ac.uk) for Zoom details

Abstract: We examine the wage and occupation outcomes for cohorts of immigrants who arrived in the UK since 2002. Using the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) with a matched migrant identifier, we can follow a 1% sample of all workers (native and migrant) within and across jobs. This also allows us to identify relative attrition rates between natives and migrants. The work focuses in particular on workers who arrived in the UK since 2004 as part of the EU expansion. Consistent with prior work, we find substantial evidence of occupational downgrading for these migrants. Importantly, the panel data allows us to track these workers in subsequent years and we find very little evidence of substantial labour market improvement from initial entry. This result is robust to accounting for non-random attrition.

Published: 14 September 2023