Immigration and Discrimination in a Former Emigrant Country: The Case of Spain

This article analyses the immigrant-native wage differentials in Spain, which only recently has become a host country. The paper exploits the Earnings Structure Survey 2006, which is the first nationally representative sample of both foreign and Spanish employees. Using the Machado-Mata econometric procedure, wage differentials between locals and foreigners are decomposed into the gap related to characteristics and the one due to different returns on endowments (i.e., discrimination). We find that, in absolute terms, the latter component grows across wage distribution, reflecting the existence of a kind of glass ceiling consistent with the evidence of over-education found by previous research.