Eva Moreno-Galbis
VC Salle 205
Centre de la Vieille Charité
2 rue de la Charité
13002 Marseille
Ugo Bolletta : ugo.bolletta2[at]unibo.it
Mathieu Faure : mathieu.faure[at]univ-amu.fr
We investigate to what extent changes in the returns to occupational tasks have contributed to different wage dynamics between immigrants and natives along the wage distribution in France. Using Labor Force Surveys from 1994 to 2012 and the task content of occupations from the O*NET database, we estimate that while immigrants and natives have experienced a similar employment dynamics, wage dynamics differs across the two nativity groups. Immigrants' wage growth outpaced that of natives along the wage distribution. We show that this different wage growth mainly comes from a divergent between-occupation wage variation, whereas within-occupation wage changes remain fairly close among natives and immigrants. We find that the contribution of returns to tasks to between-occupation wage changes does not significantly differ among both nativity groups. Estimations from a conditional logit model suggest that the divergence in between-occupation wage changes across natives and immigrants results rather from different occupation choices.