Exploring economic assimilation of immigrants and their descendants in France: recent insights

Abstract

This paper examines the labour market performances of immigrants and their descendants in France byapplying a series of empirical Tobit II models on a recent TeO2 database. Our work questions the labourmarket participation and wage disparities of these groups compared to native-born individuals bycontrolling different individual attributes, such as gender and educational level, and job characteristics,such as the firm size or the type of job. It also introduces information on ethnic origins and location. Ourstudy provides crucial insights into the labour market performances of immigrants and their descen-dants in France. It reveals that disparities manifest primarily in labour market participation rather thanwages. It also underscores that high-skilled workers’ wages do not converge as immigrants consistentlyyield lower returns on education than natives. Our findings underscore the heterogeneity within theimmigrant group based on origins criteria. The performances of immigrants with African and Northern-African origins are lower than those of other groups of immigrants.