Essays on Socio-Economic Integration of Migrants in the UK Labour Market: Access (or Lack of Access) to the Professional Class, Gendering of Occupations and Earning Trajectories

This thesis investigates socio-economic integration of men and women immigrants (‘Old’ and ‘New’) relative to United Kingdom (UK) born White in the UK labour market. In order to assess my research hypotheses I use both cross-sectional and panel data based on the world’s largest panel survey: UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS), (data collected between 2009 and 2014). The first two essays are cross-sectional studies examining access (or lack of access) to the professional class and pay asymmetry of these groups, while, the third paper, uses the full potential attributes of a ‘strict balanced’ panel to investigate occupational status transitions and earning trajectories using a more refined parsimonious random effects model approach. The main findings show that the labour market performance of immigrants differs from that of UK born White in several important ways. The education and experience of immigrants are subject to different ‘rewards’ to those of natives, and immigrants will usually end up in jobs that are a poor match for their education. These findings are in line with the results of the literature in this field. The main contributions of this thesis are twofold: substantively, the thesis addresses and explores the heterogeneity in the groups studied in terms of observable and unobservable characteristics. Also, this study is among the pioneering research being conducted with the re-scaling of complex survey weights associated with the UKHLS.