Immigrants are new comers in a labor market. As a consequence, they lack of social networks and other country specific and not directly productive valuable assets affecting their relative bargaining position against employers. We introduce this simple observation into a matching model of the labor market and show that immigrants increase employment prospects of competing natives. To test the predictions of our model, we exploit yearly variations between 1998 and 2004 in the share of immigrants within occupations of 12 European countries. We identify the causal impact of immigrants on natives' employment rate using an instrumental variable strategy based on historical settlement patterns across host countries and occupations by origin countries. We find that natives' employment rate increases in occupations and sectors receiving more immigrants. Moreover, we highlight the heterogeneity of this impact across groups of immigrants and host countries along dimensions that affect immigrants-natives relative reservation wages.

Over the period 1994–2012, immigrants’ wage growth in France outperformed that of natives. We investigate to what extent changes in task‐specific returns to skills contributed to this wage dynamics differential through two channels: changes in the valuation of skills (price effect) and occupational sorting (quantity effect). We find that the wage growth premium of immigrants is mainly explained by the progressive reallocation of immigrants toward tasks whose returns increase over time. Immigrants seem to have taken advantage of labor demand restructuring driven by globalization and technological changes.

This paper extends on French data a previous finding on US data: employment growth has been more important in the lower and upper tail of the job quality distribution. The originality of the paper is to argue that the diffusion of ICT cannot explain alone the polarization at the lower tail of the distribution. However, when combined with population aging, our framework predicts a progressive concentration of employment in the service sector (bottom tail of the job quality distribution). This results from a purely demand shift, since, as revealed by our estimations goods and services are complementary for seniors. The decrease in the relative price of goods induced by ICT diffusion is thus associated with an increased demand for services if the proportion of seniors is increasing.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E S ABSTRACTThe Spanish Productivity Puzzle in the Great Recession * While Spain had traditionally under-performed its European counterparts in terms of labor productivity, the trend is reversed after 2007. The evolution of aggregate productivity in Spain during the Great Recession largely responds to the adverse conditions in the labor market, but not only. Using a longitudinal sample of Spanish manufacturing and services companies between 1995 and 2012, we show that the recent increase in Spanish aggregate productivity also responds to the evolution of the total factor productivity (TFP) and to composition effects. By combining the information at the firm level on balance sheet items, collective agreements and imports-exports, we are able to establish that commitment to a collective agreement at the firm level and access to external markets are positively related to TFP performance during the whole period. In addition, we estimate that firm TFP was negatively correlated with the share of temporary workers during the expansion period, 1995-2007, whereas the sign of that correlation reversed completely during the crisis, 2008-2012. Finally, we relate this sign reversal with the changing composition of temporary workers in the labor market.JEL Classification: J24, J21, J52

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This paper investigates the role of productivity as a determinant of the worker's retirement intentions. Using an overlapping generation framework, we analyze the retirement decision of a cohort of workers being ability heterogeneous. The labor market is endogenously segmented between workers having the required ability level to occupy jobs where the productivity is indexed to the technological state via on-the-job training (complex jobs) and the rest of workers, who are employed in positions where productivity is relatively deteriorated in case of technological change due to the absence of on-the-job training (simple jobs). In case of technological change, workers in complex jobs delay their retirement date, whereas workers in simple positions will not modify their retirement decision unless taxes change. Using data from France, we find that after a technological change, older workers who benefit from a skill upgrading training program have a higher intended retirement age. JEL: J14; J22; J24; J26

Models developed by recent economic literature do not manage to account simultaneously for the three main stylized facts observed in many EU countries since the mid-seventies: (i) the increase in the overall unemployment rate; (ii) the difference between high-skilled and low-skilled unemployment; (iii) the stability of relative wages. This paper focuses on these issues. We construct an intertemporal general equilibrium model seeking to reproduce these facts. We consider two types of jobs and two types of workers. We allow for job competition between high-and low-skilled workers on the low-skilled segment of the labor market and for on-the-job search. Matching processes are represented by matching functionsà la Pissarides. Low-skilled search intensities are endogenous and high-skilled workers decide on the amount of effort they devote to search in each labor market segment. Biased technological change is introduced via embodied technical progress and capital-skill complementarity. The model is calibrated and simulated to evaluate the impact of various types of shocks. The model reproduces quite well the unemployment rate changes and the relative wage stability observed over the past two decades.

This paper focuses on the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) on the gender pay gap along the wage distribution. Our empirical analysis relies on two complementary French surveys conducted in 1998 and 2005 on a large sample of employees. We estimate quantile regressions and use a difference-in-difference strategy to assess the effect of new technologies. Both in 1998 and 2005, we find that the gender gap estimated for the group of ICT-users is not really different from the gap for non-users. Among ICT-users, wage differentials between men and women are mostly explained by a divergence in the rewards to identical characteristics.