The causal effect of age at migration on youth educational attainment

Dominique Lemmermann and Regina Riphahn

Economics of Education Review, 2018, vol. 63, issue C, 78-99

Abstract: We investigate the causal effect of age at migration on subsequent educational attainment in the destination country. To identify the causal effect we compare the educational attainment of siblings at age 21, exploiting the fact that they typically migrate at different ages within a given family. We consider several education outcomes conditional on family fixed effects. We take advantage of long running and detailed data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, which entails an oversample of immigrants and provides information on language skills. We find significant effects of age at migration on educational attainment and a critical age of migration not above age 6. The educational attainment of female immigrants responds more strongly to a high age at immigration than that of males. While language skills affect educational attainment they do not appear to fully explain the causal connection between age at migration and educational attainment.

Keywords: Immigration; Education; Integration; School attainment; Germany; Causal estimation; Family fixed effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 I21 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775717302625
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: The Causal Effect of Age at Migration on Youth Educational Attainment (2017)
Working Paper: The causal effect of age at migration on youth educational attainment (2016)
Working Paper: The causal effect of age at migration on youth educational attainment (2016)
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:eee:ecoedu:v:63:y:2018:i:c:p:78-99

DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2017.11.001

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Education Review is currently edited by E. Cohn

More articles in Economics of Education Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().