Full Citation
Title: Essays on Immigration
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2010
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Abstract: In the following chapters, factors that influence labor market outcomes and assimilation of immigrants in the United States are analyzed in an economic framework. The channels studied include the impact of larger flows of immigrants on the wages of other immigrants from the same countries, the effects of marrying a native or "intermarriage" on labor market outcomes of immigrant women and the impact of age of arrival to the U.S. on English proficiency and education of immigrant children. Immigration is a matter of current economic and socio-political debate all over the world, and the results presented in the following chapters are of particular interest to policy-makers and economists who design domestic and foreign policies. For all the work in this thesis, I use data from the U.S. decennial Censuses which are rich sources of information on the characteristics of immigrants. Chapter one provides a motivation and an overview for the research in chapters two through four. The second chapter studies the wage-gap profiles, vis-a-vis natives, of a rapidly growing group of "new" Asian immigrants from countries which were under-represented in the United States until 1965. While entry-level wage gaps increase and assimilation rates fall across cohorts, the unique feature of the new Asian profile is that the wage gap widens for all cohorts after the second decade of stay. For other immigrant groups, wage gaps improve throughout their working life. I use an impact of immigration argument to investigate the different curvature of "new" Asian wage-gap profiles. If occupations are imperfect substitutes, and natives and immigrants are worse substitutes than entrant and established immigrants within occupations, then the comparatively larger increases in occupation-specific "new" Asian inflows will have a greater negative impact on the wages of new Asians, compared to other groups. The explanation is studied in a nested constant elasticity of substitution (CES) framework. Elasticity parameters are estimated using cross-metropolitan variations in occupational and immigrant labor supply. The paper follows Card (2009) to create an instrument for regional labor supplies. Finally, to assess the power of this explanation, I use model estimates from 1990 to predict the wage gap between natives and Asians in 2000 that . . .
Url: https://urresearch.rochester.edu/institutionalPublicationPublicView.action?institutionalItemId=13607
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Authors: Basu, Sukanya
Institution: University of Rochester
Department: Economics
Advisor: Ronni Pavan
Degree: PhD
Publisher Location: Rochester, N.Y.
Pages:
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Migration and Immigration, Other
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