 Foreign human capital and the earnings gap between immigrants and Canadian-born workersNicole Fortin, Thomas Lemieux and Javier Torres Labour Economics, 2016, vol. 41, issue C, 104-119 Abstract: We use new information on the location of study of immigrants available in the 2006 Canadian Census to estimate returns to Canadian and foreign human capital. We find that controlling for the source of human capital (Canadian versus foreign) helps account for a large share of the immigrant/native-born wage gap. We show that commonly-used imputation procedures (e.g. Friedberg, 2000) that assign domestic and foreign education based on age at arrival tend to overestimate the returns to foreign education and underestimate the returns to foreign work experience. We also find that the immigrant/native-born wage gap is highly heterogeneous across places of birth even after including location of study fixed effects, although this inclusion markedly reduces the negative country of origin effects for countries like China, Pakistan, and India. Finally, we note substantial heterogeneity in the portability of human capital across fields of study. Keywords: Immigrant assimilation; Human capital; Wage gap (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:labeco:v:41:y:2016:i:c:p:104-119 DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2016.05.021 Access Statistics for this article Labour Economics is currently edited by A. Ichino More articles in Labour Economics from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.