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Life cycle employment of minority labor migrants who entered Norway in the early 1970s diverges from that of natives. Immigrant employment was nearly complete during early years but declined to 50% by the year 2000 (compared to 87% for a native comparison group). We find that immigrant employment is particularly sensitive to the business cycle and that economic downturns of the 1980s and 1990s accelerated their labor market exit. We trace part of the decline to migrants being overrepresented in shrinking industries. But we also identify welfare disincentives that contribute to poor life cycle employment performance of immigrants with many dependent family members.

For young male immigrants, naturalization facilitates assimilation into the U.S. labor market. Following naturalization, immigrants gain access to public-sector, white-collar, and union jobs, and wage growth accelerates--consistent with removal of employment barriers. The faster wage growth of immigrants who naturalize might alternatively result from greater human capital investment prior to naturalization, stemming from a long-term commitment to U.S. labor markets, but there is no evidence that wage growth accelerates or the distribution of jobs improves until citizenship is attained. Finally, the gains from naturalization are greater for immigrants from less-developed countries and persist when we control for unobserved productivity.

The researchers found that male immigrants in the United States earn higher wages if they are educated in the United States. This is attributed, not to greater proficiency in English, but because immigrants schooled in the United States receive higher educational attainment and are more likely to continue their education outside the U.S.

This paper studies the source of differences in wage growth between young black and white workers. Focusing on 'terminal' high school graduates from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we estimate the returns to on-the-job tenure and general labor market experience using ordinary least squares, Altonji and Shakotko, and Topel estimators. Results from all three estimators indicate that returns to general experience for black workers trail those for white workers, but that black workers earn equal if not higher returns to tenure than do white workers., I. Introduction The difference in pay across races has long been a problem of significant interest to labor economists. Recently, several authors have documented a narrowing of the pay gap [...]

Recent studies indicate that relative wages of skilled workers have increased in the United States over the past two decades (Sawhill 1988; Bound and Johnson, 1992; Katz and Murphy, 1992; [...]

I. Introduction Both legal and illegal immigration to the United States surged over the last two decades. Between 1971 and 1991, the number of legal immigrants soared from 370,478 to [...]

James F. Ragan, Jr. [*] Bernt Bratsberg [+] For more than 20 years, unions have been trading cost-of-living adjustment clauses (COLAs) for other forms of compensation. Various explanations have been [...]

Wage inequality is examined for young males over the period 1980-1993. While wage inequality increased substantially for nonunion workers over this period, wage inequality increased only modestly for union workers. In part, this difference results from divergent trends in skill prices - returns to skill rose in the nonunion sector but contracted slightly in the union sector. In particular, returns to education increased sharply in the nonunion sector while remaining stagnant in the union sector. At least for young workers, these findings suggest that unions have been largely successful in resisting market pressures for greater wage inequality. We also uncover evidence suggesting that, as relative returns to education decline in the union sector, highly educated young workers become less likely to choose union employment. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2007.02036.x Byline: Bernt Bratsberg (1), Knut Roed (2), Oddbjorn Raaum (3), Robin Naylor (4), Markus Ja[umlaut]ntti (5), Tor Eriksson (6), Eva O[umlaut]sterbacka (7) Abstract: We show that the patterns of intergenerational earnings mobility in Denmark, Finland and Norway, unlike those for the US and the UK, are highly nonlinear. The Nordic relationship between log earnings of sons and fathers is flat in the lower segments of the fathers' earnings distribution - sons growing up in the poorest households have the same adult earnings prospects as sons in moderately poor households - and is increasingly positive in middle and upper segments. This convex pattern contrasts sharply with our findings for the US and the UK, where the relationship is much closer to being linear. As a result, cross-country comparisons of intergenerational earnings elasticities may be misleading with respect to transmission mechanisms in the central parts of the earnings distribution and uninformative in the tails of the distribution. Author Affiliation: (1)Frisch Centre for Economic Research (2)Frisch Centre for Economic Research (3)Frisch Centre for Economic Research (4)University of Warwick (5)A˚bo Akademi (6)A˚rhus Business School (7)A˚bo Akademi Article History: Submitted: 24 April 2006 Accepted: 19 September 2006