Benefits of Education at the Intensive Margin: Childhood Academic Performance and Adult Outcomes among American Immigrants

Deniz Gevrek (), Z Eylem Gevrek and Cahit Guven ()
Additional contact information
Z Eylem Gevrek: Department of Economics, University of Konstanz, Box 124, 78457 Konstanz, Germany

Eastern Economic Journal, 2015, vol. 41, issue 3, 298-328

Abstract: Using the Children of the Immigrants Longitudinal Study, we examine the association between education at the intensive margin and twenty pecuniary and non-pecuniary adult outcomes among first- and second-generation American immigrant youth. Education at the intensive margin is measured by two widely used standardized math and reading test scores, national percentile rankings on these tests, and cumulative grade point average (GPA) in both middle and high school. Our findings provide evidence that the academic achievement of immigrant children in early adolescence is an accurate predictor of later life outcomes. We also examine a novel hypothesis that relative academic performance of immigrant children in high school compared to middle school, which could be an indicator of change in adolescent aspirations and motivation as well as the degree of adaptation and assimilation to the host country, has an effect on their adult outcomes even after controlling for the levels of academic performance in middle and high school. The results suggest that an improvement in GPA from middle school to high school is associated with favorable adult outcomes. Several sensitivity tests confirm the robustness of these findings.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/eej/journal/v41/n3/pdf/eej20156a.pdf Link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/eej/journal/v41/n3/full/eej20156a.html Link to full text HTML (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Benefits of Education at the Intensive Margin: Childhood Academic Performance and Adult Outcomes among American Immigrants (2014)
Working Paper: Benefits of Education at the Intensive Margin: Childhood Academic Performance and Adult Outcomes among American Immigrants (2013)
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:pal:easeco:v:41:y:2015:i:3:p:298-328

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/41302

Access Statistics for this article

Eastern Economic Journal is currently edited by Allan Zebedee and Cynthia Bansak

More articles in Eastern Economic Journal from Palgrave Macmillan, Eastern Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().