Imputation Match Bias in Immigrant Wage Convergence

Joni Hersch and Jennifer Bennett Shinall ()
Additional contact information
Jennifer Bennett Shinall: Vanderbilt Law School

Demography, 2018, vol. 55, issue 4, No 12, 1475-1485

Abstract: Abstract Although immigrants to the United States earn less at entry than their native-born counterparts, an extensive literature has found that immigrants have faster earnings growth that results in rapid convergence to native-born earnings. However, recent evidence based on U.S. Census data indicates a slowdown in the rate of earnings assimilation. We find that the pace of immigrant wage convergence based on recent data may be understated in the literature as a result of the method used by the census to impute missing information on earnings, which does not use immigration status as a match characteristic. Because both the share of immigrants in the workforce and earnings imputation rates have risen over time, imputation match bias for recent immigrants is more consequential than in earlier periods and may lead to an underestimate of the rate of immigrant wage convergence.

Keywords: Immigrant assimilation; Imputation match bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s13524-018-0686-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: Imputation Match Bias in Immigrant Wage Convergence (2018)
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:spr:demogr:v:55:y:2018:i:4:d:10.1007_s13524-018-0686-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/13524

DOI: 10.1007/s13524-018-0686-3

Access Statistics for this article

Demography is currently edited by John D. Iceland, Stephen A. Matthews and Jenny Van Hook

More articles in Demography from Springer, Population Association of America (PAA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().