Heterogeneity in the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment: evidence from Switzerland on natives and second-generation immigrants

This study applies rich data from the 2000 Swiss census to investigate the patterns of intergenerational education transmission for natives and second-generation immigrants. The level of secondary schooling attained by youth aged 17 is related to their parents’ educational outcomes based on data on the entire Swiss population. Extending economic theories of child educational attainment, we derive hypotheses regarding the patterns of intergenerational education transmission. The data yield substantial heterogeneity in intergenerational transmission across population groups. Only a small share of this heterogeneity is explained by the predictions of economic theory.

Strategic altruistic transfers and rent seeking within the family

This paper examines the rent-seeking behavior of “selfish” children in competing for parental transfers. The paper extends Chang and Weisman (South Econ J 71:821–836, 2005), that focuses on compensated transfers, to allow for non-compensated transfers à la Buchanan (J Law Econ 26:71–85, 1983) and derives results for the case in which children’s time contributions as perceived by their parents are a merit good (e.g., service), pure waste (e.g., bugging), or a mix of both. For an increase in the proportion of time contributions that are pure waste, parents find it optimal to reduce the size of an overall transfer, thereby lowering the levels of wasteful rent-seeking activities by their children within the family.

Too many migrants, too few services: a model of decision-making on immigration and integration with cultural distance

We model the political demand for immigrants as a trade-off that native voters face between having services, assumed to be produced only by unskilled and nonassimilated immigrants, and experiencing disutility due to the immigrant workers having a culture different from the native culture. Immigrants decide whether to integrate into the native culture. We show that if services are priced according to per unit costs, the market demand for immigrants will exceed the political demand. Market forces then lead to higher services prices, implying that the initially allowed number of immigrants is ‘politically’ too large.

The effect of immigration on the labor market performance of native-born workers: some evidence for Spain

This paper provides an approximation to the labor market effects of immigrants in Spain, a country where labor market institutions and immigration policy exhibit some peculiarities, during the second half of the 1990s, the period in which immigration flows accelerated. By using alternative data sets, we estimate both the impact of legal and total immigration flows on the employment rates and wages of native workers, accounting for the possible occupational and geographical mobility of immigrants and native-born workers. Using different samples and estimation procedures, we have not found a significant negative effect of immigration on either the employment rates or wages of native workers.

Are Father’s or Mother’s Socioeconomic Characteristics More Important Influences on Student Performance? Recent International Evidence

Since the early 1970s the importance of mothers’ socioeconomic characteristics on their children’s educational and occupational attainment has been acknowledged. However, it is not clear if fathers’ characteristics have a stronger influence because men usually have stronger attachments to the labour market, or alternatively mothers’ characteristics are more important because of their greater role in children’s socialization. This study addresses this question by comparing the influence of father’s and mother’s education and occupation on student performance in literacy and numeracy using data from 30 countries. The impact of mother’s education is usually greater or comparable to that of father’s education. In contrast, substantially stronger effects for mother’s occupational status compared to father’s were rare. In most countries the impact of mother’s socioeconomic characteristics (education plus occupation) on student performance is comparable to that for father’s. Of the four indicators of socioeconomic background, father’s occupational status and mother’s educational attainment tend to have stronger effects, although many countries do not conform to this pattern. There are indications that the relative importance of mother’s characteristics have increased over time.

The Place of Place: Location and Immigrant Economic Well-being in Canada

In recent years, successive cohorts of immigrants to Canada have experienced a striking level of deterioration in their economic well-being. At the same time, more immigrants than ever before are choosing to live in Montréal, Toronto, or Vancouver, Canada’s three-first-tier or ‘gateway cities’. This paper uses instrumental variable regression techniques to determine the extent to which gateway city clustering is related to immigrant economic well-being. It identifies whether employment status, earnings, and employment suitability would significantly improve if more immigrants chose to live outside of Canada’s three gateway cities. The results suggest that, for the most part, although immigrants do worse than the native-born in gateway cities, they do experience marginally higher earnings than their non-gateway counterparts. Income and unemployment rates are higher for immigrants in gateway cities than they are for the native-born, but the gateway/non-gateway disparity is minimal. Levels of employment mismatch are substantially higher in gateway cities, compared to both the gateway city native-born population, and non-gateway immigrants. An analysis of the data shows that only marginal improvements to economic well-being would result from an increase in non-gateway immigration, and that there are other factors, like race or skin colour, that seem to be more closely linked to labour market success.

Accumulation of Welfare Problems in a Longitudinal Perspective

In this article we study the bias caused by the conventional retrospective measurement of parental high cultural activities in the effects of parental high cultural activities and educational attainment on son’s or daughter’s high cultural activities. Multi-informant data show that there is both random measurement error and correlated error in the respondent’s report of parental high cultural activities. Correlated measurement error is the consequence of the fact that adult children who have higher rates of high cultural activities, report higher levels of parental cultural activities than the parents themselves do. When controls for both types of measurement error are included in structural models, the total intergenerational effect of parental high cultural activities appears to be larger than in a model without controls for measurement error, but the direct intergenerational effect is not biased if educational attainment is controlled for. The effect of educational attainment on high cultural activities is larger in models that correct for measurement error. In addition, the effect of educational attainment is stronger than the effect of parental high cultural activities, both with and without correction for measurement error.

Disagreement over the immigration of low-income earners in a welfare state

This paper studies natives’ economically motivated preferences over different levels of immigration of low-income earners. Immigration affects natives through both intra- and intergenerational redistribution programmes and in the labour market. Our analysis suggests, in a welfare state that looks after the poor and the aged, economic motivation does not necessarily lead a native to have an extreme opinion on the preferable level of immigration, although it causes disagreement among natives. We find, regardless of parameter values, high-income earners prefer at least as much immigration as low-income earners who, in turn, prefer at least as much immigration as pensioners. The median voter is then likely to be a low-income native.

Birth order matters: the effect of family size and birth order on educational attainment

Using the British Household Panel Survey, we investigate if family size and birth order affect children’s subsequent educational attainment. Theory suggests a trade-off between child quantity and “quality” and that siblings are unlikely to receive equal shares of parental resources devoted to children’s education. We construct a new birth order index that effectively purges family size from birth order and use this to test if siblings are assigned equal shares in the family’s educational resources. We find that the shares are decreasing with birth order. Ceteris paribus, children from larger families have less education, and the family size effect does not vanish when we control for birth order. These findings are robust to numerous specification checks.

Cohort Differences in Women’s Educational Attainment and the Transition to First Marriage in Ghana

This study explores the effects of educational attainment on the transition to first marriage across successive generations of women in Ghana. Considering the significant improvements in women educational attainment and career opportunities in recent decades, the paper questions the tacit assumption of prior research on the time-invariant effect of women’s educational attainment on marriage timing. Using discrete time frailty models with pooled data from the 1988, 1993, 1998 and 2003 Ghana Demographic and Health Survey, women with higher educational attainment were found to have longer transition to first marriage than their less educated counterparts. More importantly, the effect of higher education on the transition to first marriage was larger among younger women even after controlling for other factors. The stronger effect among contemporary women has been discussed in relation to ideational changes on family formation and the enhanced career opportunities for contemporary educated women.

Labor market transitions of immigrants with emphasis on marginalization and self-employment

In developed countries, immigrants are more likely to be nonemployed and self-employed compared to natives. Based on register data of male immigrants in Denmark, we performed a detailed investigation of the immigrant–native difference in transition patterns across labor market states. We find that a high proportion of immigrants from non-Western countries tend to be marginalized relative to natives, and they tend to use self-employment to escape marginalization.

Scholastic ability vs family background in educational success: evidence from Danish sample survey data

This research examines the role of scholastic ability and family background variables in the determination of educational attainment in Denmark. A categorical representation of the highest level of education attained by the individual is the dependent variable. It is analyzed by procedures that take account of the presence of unobservable factors. Parent’s education and occupation, along with an indicator of scholastic ability which is represented by a set of aptitude tests, explain a small but significant portion of the variation in their children’s educational success. Women are shown to respond differently to their environments than men, and including these test scores does not remove the need to deal with unmeasured attributes. On the basis of the available data, family background variables as a group contribute more to the explained variation in the data than the test scores. Finally, credit constraints do not appear to be a factor in educational attainments.

Welfare effects of illegal immigration

This paper analyzes the welfare effect of illegal immigration on the host country within a dynamic general equilibrium framework and shows that it is positive for two reasons. First, immigrants are paid less than their marginal product, and second, after an increase in immigration, domestic households find it optimal to increase their holdings of capital. It is also shown that dynamic inefficiency may arise, despite the fact that the model is of the Ramsey type. Nevertheless, the introduction of a minimum wage, which leads to job competition between domestic unskilled workers and immigrants reverses all of the above results.

How important is homeland education for refugees’ economic position in The Netherlands?

We use data on refugees admitted to The Netherlands that include registration of education in their homeland by immigration officers. Such data are seldom available. We investigate the quality and reliability of the registrations and then use them to assess effects on refugees’ economic position during the first 5 years after arrival. The most remarkable finding is the absence of returns to higher education.

Determinants of recent immigrants’ location choices: quasi-experimental evidence

This paper exploits a Danish spatial dispersal policy on refugees, which can be regarded as a natural experiment to investigate the influence of regional factors on recent immigrants’ location choices. The main push factors are lack of co-nationals and immigrants. Additional push factors are lack of rental, including social, housing and lack of institutions for qualifying education, which explain why recent immigrants are attracted to large cities. Finally, placed refugees tend to leave locations with relatively high regional unemployment, and there is indirect evidence of welfare seeking.

The emigration of immigrants, return vs onward migration: evidence from Sweden

This study analyzes emigration propensities for natives and immigrants delineating among immigrant emigrants between return and onward migration. Results indicate that emigrants are positively selected in terms of upper education. Well-educated immigrants have a higher probability of leaving for third-country destinations than returning to countries of origin. Predicted age–income profiles for immigrants show that return migrants have higher adjusted mean income levels than non-emigrants up to the age of 40. Onward migrants have lower predicted income levels across the age distribution due to this group’s composition and relatively low employment levels in Sweden. Separate estimations by region of origin indicate that within each group, onward migrants are more positively selected then return migrants in terms of income.

Role of Parental Education in Schooling and Child Labour Decision: Urban India in the Last Decade

This paper uses household level data from National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) of India, the 55th (1999–2000) and the 61st (2004–05) rounds, to show that even with a significant wage incentive for schooling of urban children, the school drop out rate and child labour incidence are not small over this period. The parents’ level of education plays an important role in reducing this tendency; thus establishing the linkage between social and human capital outcomes in the family. We also look at the incidence of harmful and manual occupations among the child labour. Mother’s education appears as the more important factor in the recent round in curbing the manual work incidences; supporting earlier findings that women’s empowerment (one important indicator of which would be female educational level) is indeed becoming instrumental in increasing parental awareness. Using a pooled data set, we have also analysed the changes in the impact of parental education on these decisions between 1999–2000 and 2004–05.

Increases in childlessness in New Zealand

New Zealand’s fertility fell below the theoretical replacement level (2.1 births per woman) for the first time in recorded history in 1978. It has hovered at or below replacement level ever since. The result, an impression of relative stability, belies changes taking place. Data from the 1981, 1996 and 2006 censuses show a pattern of delayed childbearing and increased childlessness. In a little over 30 years, childlessness has shifted from being almost entirely a consequence of a couple’s infecundity to being as frequently a result of a woman’s life choices. The steady rises in childlessness recorded by successive cohorts suggest that childlessness is already having a significant effect on New Zealand fertility. Patterns in characteristics of those women choosing not to start families, as well as subtle differences in these patterns between New Zealand and other developed nations, suggest that there is a significant potential for childlessness to cause a more dramatic shift in New Zealand’s total fertility rate. This analysis examines growth in childlessness in relation to marital status, country of birth, ethnicity, regional and urban differentials, religion, and educational attainment of women who were childless at the 1981, 1996 and 2006 censuses.

Explaining Cross-Country Differences in Attitudes Towards Immigration in the EU-15

In this paper, we use data from the first two rounds of the European Social Survey to analyze the extent to which differences in average attitudes towards immigration across the EU-15 countries may be explained by differences in socioeconomic characteristics and individually perceived consequences of immigration, using an extension of a decomposition technique developed by Fairlie (2005). We find that despite the significant effects of socioeconomic characteristics on attitudes, differences in the distributions of these characteristics can only explain a modest share of the cross-country variation in average attitudes. A larger part can be explained by differences in perceived consequences of immigration, but the main part is still left unexplained. Apart from providing useful input for policy makers working in the area of immigration policy, this raises a number of questions for further research for which the ESS data can be successfully applied.

Ability and rates of return to schooling—making use of the Swedish enlistment battery test

Using the Swedish military enlistment test, this paper estimates the return to schooling for individuals belonging to different parts of the ability distribution. It also attempts to predict whether an endogenous test score causes bias in the “ability-specific” returns to schooling that varies with the test score. A significant finding is that a higher score in the test is associated with a higher return to schooling, but that the positive association is diminishing in the test score. In general, the bias in the ability-specific returns to schooling does not seem to vary with the test score level.