Is Child Like Parent? Educational Attainment and Ethnic Origin

Ira Gang and Klaus Zimmermann ()

Departmental Working Papers from Rutgers University, Department of Economics

Abstract: The speed at which immigrants assimilate is the subject of debate. Human capital formation plays a major role in this discussion. This paper compares the educational attainment of second generation immigrants to those of natives in the same age cohort. Evidence using a large German data set suggests ethnicity does matter: the size of the ethnic network has a positive effect on educational attainment, and a clear pattern is exhibited between countries-of-origin and educational attainment even in the second generation. For the children of the foreign-born, parental schooling plays no role in making educational choices. However, for Germans, contrary to the general findings in the literature, there is a statistically significant difference in favor of father´s education over mother's education.

Keywords: assimilation; education; ethnicity; migration; second generation migrants (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J15 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999-08-18
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (102)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sas.rutgers.edu/virtual/snde/wp/1996-14.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Is Child like Parent? Educational Attainment and Ethnic Origin (2000)
Working Paper: Is Child like Parent? Educational Attainment and Ethnic Origin (1999)
Working Paper: Is Child Like Parent? Educational Attainment and Ethnic Origin (1996)
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:rut:rutres:199614

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Departmental Working Papers from Rutgers University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().