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Title: Long Live Your Ancestors' American Dream: The Self-Selection and Multigenerational Mobility of American Immigrants

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2017

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Abstract: This paper aims to explain the high intergenerational persistence of inequality between groups of different ancestries in the US. Initial inequality between immigrant groups is interpreted as largely due to differently strong self-selection on unobservable skill endowments. These endowments are in turn assumed to be more persistent than observable outcomes across generations. If skill endowments are responsible for a larger share of total inequality between immigrant groups than between individuals generally, the former inequality will be more persistent. This explanation implies the additional testable hypothesis that the correlation between home country characteristics that influence the self-selection pattern – in particular the distance to the US - and migrants’ or their descendants’ outcomes will increase with every new generation of descendants. This prediction receives strong empirical support: The migration distance of those who moved to the US around the turn of the 20th century has risen from explaining only 14% of inequality between ancestry groups in the immigrant generation itself, to a full 49% in the generation of their great-grandchildren today.

Url: http://conference.iza.org/conference_files/AMM_2017/ruist_j25048.pdf

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Authors: Ruist, Joakim

Publisher: University of Gothenberg

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Family and Marriage, Migration and Immigration

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