The quality of immigrant human capital and immigrant labor market outcomes

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1819794 (Table of Contents)

The present study investigates the relationship between quality of education and returns to education, using several measures of quality of education and a sample that consists of immigrants in the United States. Our main findings yield that quality of education has a positive and significant impact on returns to education for our baseline sample (the main immigrant groups). However, when nonlinearity in returns is taken into consideration and thus analyzing the link with returns of two subgroups based on education level (i.e. at most high school graduates and at least some college graduates) separately, we find different impacts of quality on the returns for the subgroups. For the immigrant groups with some college, we conclude that there is a positive and significant effect of quality of education on returns to their education while for the immigrant groups with at most 12 years of education there is no association between the quality of education and returns.