Immigrant Earnings Growth: Selection Bias or Real Progress?

Garnett Picot and Patrizio Piraino

CLSSRN working papers from Vancouver School of Economics

Abstract: We use longitudinal tax data linked to immigrant landing records to estimate the earnings growth of immigrants from three entering cohorts since the early 1980s. Selective attrition by low-earning immigrants might result in lower earnings growth with years since migration in longitudinal data compared to repeated cross-sections. Existing studies on U.S. data have found exactly this result (Lubotsky 2007, JPE). We ask whether a similar bias is observed in the Canadian data and find that it is not. We show that while low-earnings immigrants are more likely to leave the cross-sectional samples over time, the same is true for the Canadian born population. We conclude that there is no evidence of selective labour force participation patterns among immigrants in Canada compared to the native born population.

Keywords: Immigration; assimilation; longitudinal data; selection bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2010-12-28, Revised 2010-12-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Immigrant earnings growth: selection bias or real progress? (2013)
Journal Article: Immigrant earnings growth: selection bias or real progress? (2013)
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