Abstract
This paper uses data from the 1980 and 1990 U.S. Censuses to study labor market assimilation of self-employed immigrants. Separate earnings functions for the self-employed and wage/salary workers are estimated. To control for endogenous sorting into the sectors, models of the self-employment decision are estimated. Self-employed immigrants are found to do substantially better in the labor market than wage/salary immigrants. Earnings of self-employed immigrants are predicted to converge with natives’ wage/salary earnings at about age 30 and natives’ self-employed earnings at about age 40. Including the self-employed in the sample reduces the immigrant-native earnings gap by, on average, 14%.
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© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Lofstrom, M. (2004). Labor market assimilation and the self-employment decision of immigrant entrepreneurs. In: Zimmermann, K.F., Constant, A. (eds) How Labor Migrants Fare. Population Economics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24753-1_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24753-1_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-53448-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-24753-1
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