The speed at which immigrants assimilate is the subject of debate. Human capital formation plays a major role in this discussion. This paper compares the educational attainment of second generation immigrants to those of natives in the same age cohort. Evidence using a large German data set...

We examine how the speed of learning and best-response processes depends on homophily: the tendency of agents to associate disproportionately with those having similar traits. When agents' beliefs or behaviors are developed by averaging what they see among their neighbors, then convergence to a...

Estimating the effect of 'ethnic capital' on human capital investment decisions is complicated by the endogeneity of location choice of immigrants and the reflection problem. We exploit a rare immigrant settlement policy in Germany to identify the causal impact of parental peer-heterogeneity on...

The speed at which immigrants assimilate is the subject of debate. Human capital formation plays a major role in this discussion. This paper compares the educational attainment of second generation immigrants to those of natives in the same age cohort. Evidence using a large German data set...

We examine how three different communication processes operating through social networks are affected by homophily - the tendency of individuals to associate with others similar to themselves. Homophily has no effect if messages are broadcast or sent via shortest paths; only connection density...

The speed at which immigrants assimilate is the subject of debate. Human capital formation plays a major role in this discussion. This paper compares the educational attainment of second generation immigrants to those of natives in the same age cohort. Evidence using a large German data set...

Homophily is the tendency of people to associate relatively more with those who are similar to them than with those who are not. In Golub and Jackson (2010a), we introduced degree-weighted homophily (DWH), a new measure of this phenomenon, and showed that it gives a lower bound on the time it...

We explore the impact of public school assignment reforms by building a households’ school choice model with two key features—(1) endogenous residential location choice and (2) opt-out to outside schooling options. Households decide where to live taking into account that locations determine...

We consider an economic model of child development with multiple stages. Due to incomplete information, parents are not able to tailor their investments to their child's type when the child is young. We show that incomplete information weakens the importance of early investments in children when...

In every society for which we have data, people’s educational achievement is positively correlated with their parents’ education or with other indicators of their parents’ socioeconomic status. This topic is central in social science, and there is no doubt that research has intensified...