Refugees and Early Childhood Human Capital

Todd Schoellman

No 52, 2013 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: This paper quantifies cross-country differences in early childhood human capital. I embed a standard human capital production function into a cross-country model of human capital investment and labor market outcomes. The model predicts that only some human capital investment channels generate cross-country differences in early childhood human capital. I derive an empirical test of the importance of these channels. The test compares the late-life outcomes of otherwise identical immigrants who entered the U.S. at age 0 or age 5. I implement this test using the Indochinese refugees, who immigrated from poor countries during trying times, and for whom selection is unlikely to bias my results. The empirical results document a striking fact: there is no difference in late-life outcomes between Indochinese refugees who arrived at age 0 or age 5. I conclude that cross-country differences in early childhood human capital are small.

Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-dge, nep-hrm and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2013/paper_52.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:red:sed013:52

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2013 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().