We evaluate some explanations of immigrants' family labor-supply behavior. Upon arrival, immigrant husbands work less than natives, but immigrant wives work more. A conventional labor-supply model uses wage assimilation to explain these differences but is not supported by the data. More favorable results are obtained for the "family investment model," in which wives in immigrant families take on "dead-end" jobs to finance their husbands' investments in human capital. We conclude that family composition is an important correlate of immigrants' assimilation, and the family investment model can account for many of the patterns in the data.
This paper investigates whether the ethnic skill differentials introduced into the United States by the inflow of very dissimilar immigrant groups during the Great Migration of 1880-1910 have disappeared during the past century. An analysis of the 1910, 1940, and 1980 Censuses and the General Social Surveys reveals that those ethnic differentials have indeed narrowed, but that it might take four generations, or roughly 100 years, for them to disappear. The analysis also indicates that the economic mobility experienced by American-born blacks, especially since World War Two, resembles that of the white ethnic groups that made up the Great Migration.
n.a.
This article uses the 1970, 1980, and 1990 Public Use Samples of the U.S. census to document what happened to immigrant earnings in the 1980s and to determine if pre-1980 immigrant flows reached earnings parity with natives. The relative entry wage of successive immigrant cohorts declined by 9% in the 1970s and by an additional 6% in the 1980s. Although the relative wage of immigrants grows by 10% during the first 2 decades after arrival, recent immigrants will earn 15%-20% less than natives throughout much of their working lives.
The socioeconomic performance of today's workers depends not only on parental skills, but also on the average skills of the ethnic group in the parents' generation (or ethnic capital). This paper investigates the link between the ethnic externality and ethnic neighborhoods. The evidence indicates that residential segregation and the external effect of ethnicity are linked, partly because ethnic capital summarizes the socioeconomic background of the neighborhood where the children were raised. Ethnicity has an external effect, even among persons who grow up in the same neighborhood, when children are exposed frequently to persons who share the same ethnic background.
The short- and longer-term regional consequences of migration for European aggregate supply are examined in a simple model in which human capital enters the production function externally. The planner chooses a reallocation of population across East and West that cannot be replicated by the market without taxes or subsidies. The market solution in this model with free migration is always associated with an efficiency loss and might lead to the `Mezzogiorno syndrome' in the East.
Using data from the Current Population Survey, this paper describes the effect of the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 on the Miami labor market. The Mariel immigrants increased the Miami labor force by 7%, and the percentage increase in labor supply to less-skilled occupations and industries was even greater because most of the immigrants were relatively unskilled. Nevertheless, the Mariel influx appears to have had virtually no effect on the wages or unemployment rates of less-skilled workers, even among Cubans who had immigrated earlier. The author suggests that the ability of Miami's labor market to rapidly absorb the Mariel immigrants was largely owing to its adjustment to other large waves of immigrants in the two decades before the Mariel Boatlift.
This article is concerned with the determinants of English language fluency among immigrants and the effects of fluency on earnings. Using special survey data on a sample of over 800 aliens, the analysis shows the importance of certain variables not previously available, speaking fluency at migration and English reading fluency. English speaking and reading fluency both increase with duration in the United States, and the increase with duration is greater for those with more schooling and who are not Hispanic. The article shows that reading fluency is more important than speaking fluency as a determinant of earnings.
This paper analyzes the determinants of post-migration investments in education by adult immigrants using survey data for Australia. OLS, logit and multinominal logit analyses are employed. Post-migration educational attainment varies negatively with age at arrival and positively with respect to duration in the destination, pre-immigration schooling and pre-immigration occupational status. The effects of country of origin and visa category at entry are also analyzed. The positive ("complementary") relation between pre- and post-migration schooling in these data. where both are directly measured, suggests that the "substitute" relation found in studies for the United States may be the spurious result of measurement error.
This paper analyzes the link between rising city crime rates and urban flight. Each additional reported crime is associated with a roughly one-person decline in city population. Almost all of the crime-related population decline is attributable to increased out-migration rather than a decrease in new arrivals. Households that leave the city because of crime are much more likely to remain within the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) than those that leave the city for other reasons. Migration decisions of highly educated households and those with children are particularly responsive to changes in crime. Causality appears to run from rising crime rates to city depopulation.
This paper deals with the destination decision of political migrants who, in spite of having strong cultural, ideological and religious ties to a particular potential destination, choose to emigrate elsewhere. The model presented characterizes the migrants, who have a choice of two possible destinations, by two properties, skill level and financial resources, and identifies those that move to each destination. The paper examines various immigration-encouraging policies and shows that although all of them will increase immigration, in some cases the economic quality of the new immigrants will rise and in some it will fall. This paper includes general evidence on the present immigration to Israel and some suggestions for empirical tests.
Immigration, as a source of population growth, is traditionally associated, by neoclassical economics, with negative output and growth effects for the host economy in per capita terms. This paper explores how different these effects can be when the human capital brought in by immigrants upon arrival is explicitly considered in a Solow growth model augmented by human capital and migration. The main finding is that the negative output and growth effects of immigration tend to become less important the higher the imported immigrants' human capital relative to natives. In order to evaluate the order of magnitude of these effects, descriptive evidence, based on education data, and econometric evidence, based upon the estimation of the transition equation in the augmented Solow model, is provided for a set of OECD economies during the period 1960-1985. Because of their human capital content, migration inflows are shown to have less than half the negative impact of comparable natural population increases.
This paper analyzes the welfare effects of immigration and its subsequent effect on ethnic diversity in a model featuring human capital spillovers which depend on the degree of ethnic heterogeneity, variation rates of time preference across individuals and endogenous levels of immigration and assimilation. In the model, an increase in ethnic diversity reduces the spillovers effect for the majority. Nonetheless, immigration can be welfare improving for the majority ethnic group even if it increases the degree of diversity as long as it raises the average human capital level and/or growth rate by increasing the proportion of people with low rates of time preference. However, if an economy is too homogenous, it will not be able to attract immigrants. Finally, if the level of immigration is not too high, then immigration also raises the net benefits to assimilation which leads to a more homogenous economy.
This paper investigates human capital investment of immigrants whose duration in the host country is limited, either by contract or by their own choice. The first part of the paper develops a model which distinguishes between temporary Migrations where the return time is exogenous or optimally chosen. The analysis has a number of interesting implications for empirical work, some of which are explored in the second part of the paper. The analysis focuses on language capital and tests the hypothesis that country specific human capital investments are sensitive to the duration in the host country's labour market. The results show that the acquisition of language capital is sensitive to the intended duration in the host country.
Using data from special supplements to the Current Population Survey (CPS), the authors track the education and hourly earnings of recent male immigrants to the United States. In terms of these measures of labor market skills, the CPS data suggest that immigrants who came in the late 1980s were more skilled than those who arrived earlier in the decade. This pattern represents a break from the steady decline in immigrant skill levels observed in 1940-80 Census data. Despite the encouraging trend over the 1980s, however, the average skills of recent immigrants remain low by historical standards.
This paper examines the effects of changes in Canadian immigration policy on the occupational composition of immigration. We focus on 1967 changes that created a regulatory system, including the point system, that still forms the framework of Canadian immigration policy. We find that the point system provides some control over occupational composition but that its effectiveness in fine tuning is limited by the large number of other characteristics it seeks to control. We also find that entry class and source country composition of the inflow have impacts that have swamped the effects of the point system in the last two decades.
This paper uses the Cotton/Neumark decomposition methodology and 1990 CPS data to investigate the relative importance of labour market structure and human capital in explaining the white male/Asian, white male/black, white male/Hispanic wage gaps. We find that labour market structure is more important than human capital in explaining the white minority wage gaps. Moreover, most of the labour market structural effects are due to differential returns to white structural characteristics. Our result is robust to the specification of human capital. Our results contradict the results of research that indicate that the white/minority wage gaps can be explained solely by differences in the endowment of human capital. Our results have implications for narrowing the wage gaps between whites and racial minorities.
© 2004 European Expert Network on Economics of Education This e-mail address is protected against spambots. Please activate JavaScript in order to see them. | Home | Site Map | Contacts | Impressum | Printversion
