A pervasive, yet little acknowledged feature of international migration to developed countries is that newly arriving immigrants are increasingly highly skilled since the 1980s. This paper analyses the determinants of changes in the skill composition of immigrants using a framework suggested by...

We study the impact of language deficiency on the health production of childhood migrants to Australia. Our identification strategy relies on a quasi-experiment comparing immigrants arriving at different ages and from different linguistic origins by utilising a measure of differences along a...

We create a longitudinal data set by matching immigrants in Israel's censuses for 1983 and 1995. These panel data reject the Immigrant Assimilation Hypothesis (IAH), which predicts that immigrants with shorter durations in 1983 should have experienced faster earnings growth between 1983 and...

Quite often, migrants appear to exert little effort to absorb the mainstream culture and to learn the language of their host society, even though the economic returns (increased productivity and enhanced earnings) to assimilation are high. We show that when interpersonal comparisons affect...

Using data from the 2001 Census of Population and Housing in Australia, this paper investigates the determinants, and consequences for earnings, of computer use by both the native born and the foreign born. Focussing on the foreign born, the multivariate analyses show that recent arrivals are...

This paper is concerned with why immigrants appear to have consistently lower partial effects of schooling on earnings than the native born, both across destinations and in different time periods within countries. It uses the Over-Under-Required education approach to occupations, a new...

This paper examines ethnicity among highly skilled immigrants to the United States. The paper focuses on five classic components of ethnicity - country of birth, race, skin color, language, and religion - among persons admitted to legal permanent residence in the United States in 2003 in the...

Economic theory suggests that selective immigration policies based on observable characteristics will affect unobservable migrant quality. Little empirical evidence exists on this hypothesis. We quantify traditionally unobservable components of migrant quality in Australia, a high-migrant share...

This paper asks to what extent host language proficiency can insure immigrants against the risk of ending up in mismatched jobs. Using the 2003-2016 waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA), the paper discriminates between three forms of mismatch,...

We use the panel data from the Building a New Life in Australia survey to examine the relationships between proficiency in English and labour market outcomes among humanitarian migrants. Having better general or speaking skills in English is certainly associated with a higher propensity for...