Country of Origin, Earnings Convergence, and Human Capital Investment: A New Method for the Analysis of U.S. Immigrant Economic Assimilation

Harriet Duleep, Xingfei Liu and Mark Regets

No 247, GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO)

Abstract: The initial earnings of U.S. immigrants vary enormously by country of origin. Via three interrelated analyses, we show earnings convergence across source countries with time in the United States. Human-capital theory plausibly explains the inverse relationship between initial earnings and earnings growth rates: the good fit between data and theory suggests that variation in initial skill transferability—not variation in the “quality” of human capital—underlies variation in initial earnings. A new method of testing for emigration bias confirms that selective emigration does not cause the convergence. Functional form and sample selections embedded in most recent analyses of immigrant economic assimilation bias downwards the earnings growth of post-1965 U.S. immigrants. When both functional-form and sample-selection constraints are lifted, a dramatically different picture of the economic assimilation of U.S. immigrants emerges.

Keywords: immigrant economic assimilation; human capital investment; country of origin; immigrant earnings convergence; earnings growth; unbiased estimation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C1 J1 J2 J3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro, nep-int, nep-lma and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/182071/1/GLO-DP-0247.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:glodps:247

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().