How Do Immigrants Spend Time?: The Process of Assimilation

Daniel Hamermesh and Stephen Trejo

No 16430, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Using 2004-2008 data from the American Time Use Survey, we show that sharp differences between the time use of immigrants and natives become noticeable when activities are distinguished by incidence and intensity. We develop a theory of the process of assimilation--what immigrants do with their time--based on the notion that assimilating activities entail fixed costs. The theory predicts that immigrants will be less likely than natives to undertake such activities, but conditional on undertaking them, immigrants will spend more time on them than natives. We identify several activities--purchasing, education and market work--as requiring the most interaction with the native world, and these activities more than others fit the theoretical predictions. Additional tests suggest that the costs of assimilating derive from the costs of learning English and from some immigrants' unfamiliarity with a high-income market economy. A replication using the 1992 Australian Time Use Survey yields remarkably similar results.

JEL-codes: J22 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-10
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published as Journal of Population Economics April 2013, Volume 26, Issue 2, pp 507-530

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16430.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:nbr:nberwo:16430

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16430

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().