Public and private sector earnings of immigrants and the Canadian-born: Evidence from the Labour Force Survey

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Résumé (anglais)

Using Statistics Canada’s monthly Labour Force Survey master files from January 2006 to December 2018, this paper evaluates the wage differences between immigrants and comparable Canadian-born workers both within the respective levels of the private and public sectors, as well as the public sector wage premium within the immigrant and Canadian-born populations. Using both Ordinary Least Squares and Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition techniques, we find that the immigrant wage gap tends to be negative and is largest in the private sector. The public-sector premium relative to the private sector is also larger for immigrants that for the Canadian-born when we compare wage differences within the two groups. Combined, these results suggest that public sector wages are important to narrowing the overall immigrant wage gap.