How relevant is the origin of human capital for immigrant wages? Evidence from Spain

Esteban Sanroma, Raul Ramos and Hipolito Simon ()

Journal of Applied Economics, 2015, vol. 18, 149-172

Abstract: The objective of this article is to analyse the role played by the different components of human capital in the wage determination of immigrants in the Spanish labour market. Using microdata from the Encuesta Nacional de Inmigrantes, we find that human capital of immigrants acquired in Spain presents higher returns than human capital obtained in home countries, reflecting the limited international transferability of the latter. This result is reinforced by the strong heterogeneity observed in wage returns to different kinds of human capital across immigrants from different origins and, in particular, by the fact that immigrants with the higher returns to human capital acquired in their home countries are those coming from other developed countries and Latin America, the two regions more similar to Spain in terms of development and/or culture.

Keywords: immigration; wages; human capital; assimilation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 J24 J31 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ucema.edu.ar/publicaciones/download/volume18/Sanroma.pdf Paper (application/pdf)
https://ucema.edu.ar/publicaciones/download/volume18/Sanroma_appendix.pdf Online Appendix (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: How Relevant Is the Origin of Human Capital for Immigrant Wages? Evidence from Spain (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cem:jaecon:v:18:y:2015:n:1:p:149-172

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Applied Economics is currently edited by Germán Coloma and Mariana Conte Grand and Jorge M. Streb

More articles in Journal of Applied Economics from Universidad del CEMA Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Valeria Dowding ().