The Impacts of Immigration on Earnings and Employment Accounting for Effective Immigrant Work Experience

Abstract

A large segment of New Zealand’s population is made up of foreign-born individuals. Despite the significant role that foreign-born individuals play in New Zealand society, little research has been done to address the impact of immigration on the labour market. In this paper we re-examine the impact of immigration in New Zealand using a panel of individual-level New Zealand Income Survey data and the national level methodology. We extend the model to include regional effects, and we incorporate measures of effective immigrant work experience, which reflect the values placed on immigrants’ human capital (work experience) in the host country. We find that immigration has little impact on earnings and employment hours. The results further confirm that the effective-experience measure improves the precision of the immigration impact estimates.