Wage of Immigrants in the Canadian Labour Market

This paper uses 1991, 1996, 2001 and 2006 PUMF Canadian census data to evaluate how long it might take for the earnings of new immigrant men to catch up to the earnings of their comparable Canadian-born men, based on the log-earning model from David E. Bloom, Gilles Grenier, and Morley Gunderson (1995) when controlling for regional effects. The results suggest that the estimate of years to equality and their respective confidence interval are roughly higher in the Bloom et al. (1995) model than the new ones; after accounting for entry, assimilation and cohort effects. It will take on average forty-four years for the earnings of new immigrant men to catch up to the earnings of comparable Canadian-born men, after controlling the cohort effects in the pooled sample data. The estimate and confidence interval of years to equality are also given for different regions across sectional and pooled data. The results suggest a large variation of these estimates across regions and different cohorts