This thesis explores several issues in the adaptation process of immigrants and
their children in Canada.
Chapter 2 investigates why second-generation immigrants are better educated
than the remaining population. Using a standard human capital framework where
individuals choose how much to invest in both their children's and their own
human capital, I show that a gap in education can arise in the absence of
differences in unobservable characteristics between immigrants and the native
born. Rather, it can arise due to institutional factors such as imperfect
transferability of foreign human capital and credit constraints. The model's
key implication is a negative relationship between parental human capital
investments and children's educational attainment, particularly in families
with uneducated parents. I find strong empirical evidence of such tradeoffs in
human capital investments occurring within immigrant families.
Chapter 3 re-assesses the effect of living in an ethnic enclave on labour
market outcomes of immigrants. I find evidence of cohort effects in the
relationship between mean earnings and the proportion of co-ethnics in the CMA
which vary by education level. Next, using information on the proportion of
one's friends who share one's ethnicity, I test a common assumption that the
enclave effect is a network effect. I find that traditional, geography-based
measures of the ethnic enclave effect capture the impact of factor(s) other
than social networks. In fact, the two effects generally offset each other to
some degree in determining immigrant employment outcomes. Neither measure has a
statistically significant effect on average immigrant earnings, at least in
cross-sectional data.
Chapter 4, co-authored with David Green and Craig Riddell, tests two
alternative theories about why immigrants earn less than native-born workers
with similar educational attainment and experience - discrimination versus
lower skills (measured by literacy test scores). We find that immigrant workers
educated abroad have lower cognitive skill levels (assessed in English or
French) than similar native-born workers. This skills gap can explain much of
the earnings gap. At the same time, foreign-educated immigrants receive no
lower returns to skills than the native born. These results offer strong
evidence against the discrimination hypothesis.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/1407 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Bonikowska, Aneta Kinga |
| Publisher | University of British Columbia |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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