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The Quality of Immigrant Source Country Educational Outcomes: Do they Matter in the Receiving Country?

Author Info

  • Qing Li

    ()

    (McMaster University)

  • Arthur Sweetman

    ()

    (McMaster University)

Abstract

International test scores are used to proxy the quality of source country educational outcomes and explain differences in the rate of return to schooling among immigrants in Canada. The average quality of educational outcomes in an immigrant’s source country and the rate of return to schooling in the host country labour market are found to have a strong and positive association. However, in contrast to those who completed their education pre-immigration, immigrants who arrived at a young age are not influenced by this educational quality measure. Also, the results are not much affected when the source country’s GDP per capita and other nation-level characteristics are used as control variables. Together, these observations reinforce the argument that the quality of educational outcomes has explanatory power for labour market outcomes. The effects are strongest for males and for females without children.

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Paper provided by Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM), Department of Economics, University College London in its series CReAM Discussion Paper Series with number 1332.

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Date of creation: Dec 2013
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Handle: RePEc:crm:wpaper:1332
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Keywords: Immigration; Quality of Education; Earnings;

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:
  • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
  • J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
  • J61 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers

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Cited by:

  1. Warman, Casey & Worswick, Christopher, 2014. "Technological Change and Declining Immigrant Outcomes, Implications for Income Inequality in Canada," CLSSRN working papers clsrn_admin-2014-51, Vancouver School of Economics, revised 25 Nov 2014.
  2. Adsera, Alicia & Ferrer, Ana, 2014. "The effect of linguistic proximity on the occupational assimilation of immigrant men," CLSSRN working papers clsrn_admin-2014-47, Vancouver School of Economics, revised 24 Oct 2014.

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