Essays on the Role of Ethnicity in Labor Market Outcomes and Human Capital

Abstract

The first chapter of this dissertation examines the existence and cause of occupational hierarchies among immigrant worker groups in the United States. It first documents the persistent ranking of immigrant labor groups as reflected by their position in occupational distribution. We do this by examining the United States Census data for the period 1940-2011 and constructing the empirical occupational distribution of immigrant labor for major metropolitan regions using the Duncan Socioeconomic Index values. Having established the persistence of rankings across regions and time we estimate a structural model which maps immigrant workers into the occupational distribution on the basis of employers' perception of their perceived productivity. The estimates from the model strongly suggest that while individual human capital characteristics are important determinants of location in the occupational distribution a key factor, and the cause of persistence, is the presence of immigrant networks in occupations.

In the second chapter we examine whether ethnicity plays a significant role in inter-generational transfer of human capital. Relying on heteroskedasticity to identify parameters in presence of endogeneity, we revisit the Borjas ethnic capital hypothesis. In line with the literature, we find evidence that the OLS estimates of the effect of parental human capital on the children's educational attainment is biased upwards. The same is true for the estimates of the effects of the ethnic capital on intergenerational transmission of education. We also find that while parental capital has a relatively constant effect over time, the effect of ethnic capital has declined over the years. Interestingly, we also find evidence that women benefit from the quality of their ethnic environment while men appear to be unaffected by it.