Discrimination salariale envers les migrants - De l'importance du pays de naissance et de la concurrence sur le marché des produits

Using a merged employer-employee panel dataset of 13 thousand firms for the 1999-2010 period, the objective of this paper is to analyse wage discrimination against migrants on the Belgian private labour market. More precisely, we specify an à la Bartolucci (2014) wage-setting equation including a direct measure of worker productivity in order to quantify wage discrimination against migrants divided by subgroups according to their country of birth. Controlling for a wide range of worker and firm characteristics, firms' time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity and potential endogeneity of the composition of the workforce, our preferred results estimate a wage discrimination of 6.1% against non-EU15 workers, this figure hiding large disparities among them. In addition, our paper is also one of the few to examine whether product market competition interacts with racial wage discrimination. Our results suggest that wage discrimination vanishes in highly competitive product market situations, in line with Becker's theory (1957).