A Note on Measures of Human Capital for Immigrants: Examining the American Community Survey and New Immigrant Survey

Randall Akee and Mutlu Yuksel

No 3897, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: In this paper we examine whether where one acquires their human capital matters in earnings regressions. We focus on a nationally-representative US data set and find that there is little difference between a measure of total years of education and measures for US and foreign-based years of education. There is a large difference, however, in where total experience is acquired: US-based experience commands a higher return to wages and is statistically highly significant. The measures used in this analysis must be inferred based on the year of migration to the US. Using an immigrant-specific data set, the New Immigrant Survey which contains explicit information on the human capital acquired in the US and abroad, we confirm these results.

Keywords: immigrants; schooling; rates of return (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J24 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2008-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-mig
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp3897.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:iza:izadps:dp3897

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().