Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Where Do Immigrants Fare Worse? Modeling Workplace Wage Gap Variation With Longitudinal Employer-Employee Data, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Dustin Avent-Holt, Martin Hällsten

Sociology Department Faculty Publication Series

The authors propose a strategy for observing and explaining workplace variance in categorically linked inequalities. Using Swedish economy-wide linked employer-employee panel data, the authors examinevariationinworkplacewageinequalitiesbetweennativeSwedes and non-Western immigrants. Consistent with relational inequality theory, the authors’ findings are thatimmigrant-native wagegaps vary dramatically across workplaces, even net of strong human capital controls. The authors also find that, net of observed and fixed-effect controls for individual traits, workplace immigrant-native wage gaps decline with increased workplace immigrant employment and managerial representation and increase when job segregation rises. These results are stronger in high-inequality workplaces and for white-collar employees: contexts in which one expects status-based …