Gender and Ethnicity--Married Immigrants in Britain

Abstract

In this paper we investigate economic activity of female immigrants and their husbands in Britain. We distinguish between two immigrant groups: foreign born females who belong to an ethnic minority group and their husbands, and foreign born females who are white and their husbands. We compare these to native born white women and their husbands. Our analysis deviates from the usual mean analysis and investigates employment, hours worked and earnings for males and females, as well as their combined family earnings, along the distribution of husbands' economic potential. We analyse the extent to which economic disadvantage may be reinforced on the household level. We investigate to what extent disadvantage can be explained by differences in observable characteristics. We analyse employment assimilation for all groups over the migration cycle. Our main results are that white female immigrants and their husbands are quite successful, with an overall advantage in earnings over white native born both individually and at the household level. On the other hand, minority immigrants and their husbands are less successful, in particular at the lower end of the husband's distribution of economic potential. This is mainly due to low employment of both genders, which leads to disadvantage in earnings, intensified at the household level. Only part of this differential can be explained by observable characteristics. Over the migration cycle, the data suggests that employment differentials are large at entry for white immigrant females, and even larger for minority females, but the gap to the native born closes. Assimilation is more rapid for white females. Gender and EthnicityAbstract: In this paper we investigate the economic activity of married or cohabiting female immigrants in Britain. We distinguish between two immigrant groups: foreign born females who belong to an ethnic minority group and their husbands, and foreign born white females and their husbands. We compare these to native born white women and their husbands. Our analysis deviates from the usual mean analysis and investigates employment, hours worked and earnings for males and females, as well as their combined family earnings, along the distribution of husbands' economic potential. We analyse the extent to which economic disadvantage may be reinforced at the household level and investigate to what extent it can be explained by differences in observable characteristics. We find that white female immigrants and their husbands have an overall advantage in earnings over white native born, both individually and at the household level. Minority immigrants do less well, in particular at the lower end of the husband's economic potential distribution. This is mainly due to the low employment of both genders, which leads to a disadvantage in earnings, intensified at the household level. Only part of this differential can be explained by observable characteristics.

Immigrants in the British Labour Market*

“…2 Not only earnings or wages of immigrants have been investigated in the literature, but also employment, labour force participation, and self employment. More recently, researchers have investigated the assimilation patterns of family of immigrants for Canada (Baker and Benjamin (1997)), the US (Blau et al (2003)), Australia (Meng and Gregory (2005)), and Britain (Dustmann and Fabbri (2005)). …”

Exchange rate fluctuations and immigrants' labour market outcomes: New evidence from Australian household panel data

“…Second and more importantly, unlike the previous paper which uses cross sectional data (and thus cannot effectively control for unobserved individual effects such as work ethic or ability), this paper uses panel data to control for unobserved individual heterogeneity. Previous studies have demonstrated the importance of controlling for unobserved individual heterogeneity in modelling labour market outcomes of immigrants in Australia (Cobb-Clark et al 2012;Breunig et al 2013), Canada (Hum & Simpson 2004), Germany (Fertig & Schurer 2007) and the US (Borjas 1985;Hu 2000;Duleep & Dowhan 2002;Dustmann & Fabbri 2005;Lubotsky 2007;Abramitzky et al 2014). This paper thus provides another robustness check for whether the previous findings change when individual fixed effects are accounted for.…”

Immigrants’ time use: a survey of methods and evidence

“…Researchers have used data on immigrants' work hours to investigate other aspects of labor supply models. Dustmann and Fabri (2005) examined the heterogeneity of immigrant couples' labor supply conditional on their ethnicity and the husbands' earnings potential in the U.K. using the LFS. They found that non-white immigrant husbands and wives worked more than white natives and that the labor supply differences were largest for households where the husbands had the lowest wages.…”