Immigrants' Earnings Growth and Return Migration from the U.S.: Examining their Determinants using Linked Survey and Administrative Data
March 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-10
Abstract
Using a novel panel data set of recent immigrants to the U.S. (2005-2007) from individual-level linked U.S. Census Bureau survey data and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) administrative records, we identify the determinants of return migration and earnings growth for this immigrant arrival cohort. We show that by 10 years after arrival almost 40 percent have return migrated. Our analysis examines these flows by educational attainment, country of birth, and English language ability separately for each gender. We show, for the first time, that return migrants experience downward earnings mobility over two to three years prior to their return migration. This finding suggests that economic shocks are closely related to emigration decisions; time-variant unobserved characteristics may be more important in determining out-migration than previously known. We also show that wage assimilation with native-born populations occurs fairly quickly; after 10 years there is strong convergence in earnings by several characteristics. Finally, we confirm that the use of stock-based panel data lead to estimates of slower earnings growth than is found using repeated cross-section data. However, we also show, using selection-correction methods in our panel data, that stock-based panel data may understate the rate of earnings growth for the initial immigrant arrival cohort when emigration is not accounted for.
Document Tags and Keywords
Keywords
Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative
keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant
keywords.
By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the
text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but
provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
economist,
ethnic,
recession,
immigrant,
population,
native,
immigration,
migrate,
migration,
migrating,
migrant,
assimilation
Tags
Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at
several tasks, including entity tagging.
The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech,
including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are
identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Internal Revenue Service,
Social Security Administration,
Current Population Survey,
Employer Identification Numbers,
Survey of Income and Program Participation,
Social Security,
American Community Survey,
Social Security Number,
Detailed Earnings Records,
Protected Identification Key,
W-2,
Census Bureau Disclosure Review Board,
Disclosure Review Board,
Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers
Similar Working Papers
Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural
network model
know as Doc2Vec.
Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the
capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to
associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as
document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The
document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers.
Papers identified with 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.
The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'Immigrants' Earnings Growth and Return Migration from the U.S.: Examining their Determinants using Linked Survey and Administrative Data' are listed below in order of similarity.
-
Working PaperForeign vs. U.S. Graduate Degrees: The Impact on Earnings Assimilation and Return Migration for the Foreign Born🔥
June 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-17
Using a novel panel data set of recent immigrants to the U.S., we identify return migration rates and earnings trajectories of two immigrant groups: those with foreign graduate degrees and those with a U.S. graduate degree. We focus on immigrants (of both genders) to the U.S. who arrive in the same entry cohort and from the same country of birth over the period 2005-2015. In Census-IRS administrative data, we find that downward earnings trajectories are predictive of return migration for immigrants with degrees acquired abroad. Meanwhile, immigrants with U.S.-acquired graduate degrees experience mainly upward earnings mobility.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperEarnings Inequality and Immobility for Hispanics and Asians: An Examination of Variation Across Subgroups🔥
September 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-30
Our analysis provides the rst disaggregated examination of earnings inequality and immobility within the Hispanic ethnic group and the Asian race group in the U.S. over the period of 2005-2015. Our analysis differentiates between long-term immigrant and native-born Hispanics and Asians relative to recent immigrants to the U.S. (post 2005) and new labor market entrants. Our results show that for the Asian and Hispanic population aged 18-45, earnings inequality is constant or slightly decreasing for the long-term immigrant and native-born populations. However, including new labor market entrants and recent immigrants to the U.S. contributes significantly to the earnings inequality for these groups at both the aggregate and disaggregated race or ethnic group levels. These findings have important implications for the measurement of inequality for racial and ethnic groups that have higher proportions of new immigrants and new labor market entrants in the U.S.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Long-Term Effects of Job Mobility on the Adult Earnings of Young Men: Evidence from Integrated Employer-Employee Data
June 2005
Working Paper Number:
CES-05-05
The paper follows a population of 18-year-old men to examine the impact that early job mobility has on their earnings prospects as young adults. Longitudinal employer-employee data from the state of Maryland allow me to take into consideration the endogenous determination of mobility in response to unobserved worker as well as firm characteristics, which may lead to spurious results. The descriptive portion of the paper shows that mobility patterns of young workers differ considerably with the characteristics of the firm; however, growth patterns are not significantly different on average. Workers employed in high-turnover firms (such as those in retail and services) experience more job turnover but similar rates of wage growth compared to workers employed in low turnover firms (such as those in manufacturing); however, their wage levels remain below and the wage gap actually increases over time. Regression results controlling for unobservable show that employers in the low-turnover sector discount earnings of workers who displayed early market mobility. By contrast, I find no evidence that mobility has negative effects for workers that remain employed in the high turnover sector.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperEstimating Measurement Error in SIPP Annual Job Earnings: A Comparison of Census Bureau Survey and SSA Administrative Data
July 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-20
We quantify sources of variation in annual job earnings data collected by the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to determine how much of the variation is the result of measurement error. Jobs reported in the SIPP are linked to jobs reported in an administrative database, the Detailed Earnings Records (DER) drawn from the Social Security Administration's Master Earnings File, a universe file of all earnings reported on W-2 tax forms. As a result of the match, each job potentially has two earnings observations per year: survey and administrative. Unlike previous validation studies, both of these earnings measures are viewed as noisy measures of some underlying true amount of annual earnings. While the existence of survey error resulting from respondent mistakes or misinterpretation is widely accepted, the idea that administrative data are also error-prone is new. Possible sources of employer reporting error, employee under-reporting of compensation such as tips, and general differences between how earnings may be reported on tax forms and in surveys, necessitates the discarding of the assumption that administrative data are a true measure of the quantity that the survey was designed to collect. In addition, errors in matching SIPP and DER jobs, a necessary task in any use of administrative data, also contribute to measurement error in both earnings variables. We begin by comparing SIPP and DER earnings for different demographic and education groups of SIPP respondents. We also calculate different measures of changes in earnings for individuals switching jobs. We estimate a standard earnings equation model using SIPP and DER earnings and compare the resulting coefficients. Finally exploiting the presence of individuals with multiple jobs and shared employers over time, we estimate an econometric model that includes random person and firm effects, a common error component shared by SIPP and DER earnings, and two independent error components that represent the variation unique to each earnings measure. We compare the variance components from this model and consider how the DER and SIPP differ across unobservable components.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Parental Gender Earnings Gap in the United States
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-68
This paper examines the parental gender earnings gap, the within-couple differences in earnings over time, before and after the birth of a child. The presence and timing of children are important components of the gender wage gap, but there is selection in both decisions. We estimate the earnings gap between male and female spouses over time, which allows us to control for this timing choice as well as other shared external earnings shifters, such as the local labor market. We use Social Security Administration Detail Earnings Records (SSA-DER) data linked to the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to examine a panel of earnings from 1978 to 2011 for the individuals in the SIPP sample. Our main results show that the spousal earnings gap doubles between two years before the birth of the first child and the year after that child is born. After the child's first year of life the gap continues to grow for the next five years, but at a much slower rate, then tapers off and even begins to fall once the child reaches school-age.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperGeographic Immobility in the United States: Assessing the Prevalence and Characteristics of Those Who Never Migrate Across State Lines Using Linked Federal Tax Microdata
March 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-19
This paper explores the prevalence and characteristics of those who never migrate at the state scale in the U.S. Studying people who never migrate requires regular and frequent observation of their residential location for a lifetime, or at least for many years. A novel U.S. population-sized longitudinal dataset that links individual level Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Social Security Administration (SSA) administrative records supplies this information annually, along with information on income and socio-demographic characteristics. We use these administrative microdata to follow a cohort aged between 15 and 50 in 2001 from 2001 to 2016, differentiating those who lived in the same state every year during this period (i.e., never made an interstate move) from those who lived in more than one state (i.e., made at least one interstate move). We find those who never made an interstate move comprised 75 percent of the total population of this age cohort. This percentage varies by year of age but never falls below 62 percent even for those who were teenagers or young adults in 2001. There are also variations in these percentages by sex, race, nativity, and income, with the latter having the largest effects. We also find substantial variation in these percentages across states. Our findings suggest a need for more research on geographically immobile populations in U.S.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperRacial Disparity in an Era of Increasing Income Inequality
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
carra-2017-01
Using unique linked data, we examine income inequality and mobility across racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Our data encompass the universe of tax filers in the U.S. for the period 2000 to 2014, matched with individual-level race and ethnicity information from multiple censuses and American Community Survey data. We document both income inequality and mobility trends over the period. We find significant stratification in terms of average incomes by race and ethnic group and distinct differences in within-group income inequality. The groups with the highest incomes - Whites and Asians - also have the highest levels of within-group inequality and the lowest levels of within-group mobility. The reverse is true for the lowest-income groups: Blacks, American Indians, and Hispanics have lower within-group inequality and immobility. On the other hand, our low-income groups are also highly immobile when looking at overall, rather than within-group, mobility. These same groups also have a higher probability of experiencing downward mobility compared with Whites and Asians. We also find that within-group income inequality increased for all groups between 2000 and 2014, and the increase was especially large for Whites. In regression analyses using individual-level panel data, we find persistent differences by race and ethnicity in incomes over time. We also examine young tax filers (ages 25-35) and investigate the long-term effects of local economic and racial residential segregation conditions at the start of their careers. We find persistent long-run effects of racial residential segregation at career entry on the incomes of certain groups. The picture that emerges from our analysis is of a rigid income structure, with mainly Whites and Asians confined to the top and Blacks, American Indians, and Hispanics confined to the bottom.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperTrends in Earnings Inequality and Earnings Instability among U.S. Couples: How Important is Assortative Matching?
January 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-04
We examine changes in inequality and instability of the combined earnings of married couples over the 1980-2009 period using two U.S. panel data sets: Social Security earnings data matched to Survey of Income and Program Participation panels (SIPP-SSA) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Relative to male earnings inequality, the inequality of couples' earnings is both lower in levels and rises by a smaller amount. We also find that couples' earnings instability is lower in levels compared to male earnings instability and actually declines in the SIPP-SSA data. While wives' earnings played an important role in dampening the rise in inequality and year-to-year variation in resources at the family level, we find that marital sorting and coordination of labor supply decisions at the family level played a minor role. Comparing actual couples to randomly paired simulated couples, we find very similar trends in earnings inequality and instability.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Impact of College Education on Old-Age Mortality: A Study of Marginal Treatment Effects
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-30
Using a newly constructed dataset that links 2000 U.S. Census long-form records to Social Security Administration data files, I evaluate the effect of college education on mortality. In an OLS regression, women and men who have at least some college education have 20% lower mortality rates than those with a high school degree or less. I proceed with an empirical design intended to illuminate the extent to which this relationship is causal, estimating marginal treatment effects (MTEs) using the proximity of the nearest college to individuals' birthplace as an instrument. Results indicate positive selection into college education (in terms of longevity) for both women and men. Selection drives almost all of the mortality gap for women. For men, longevity gains from college attendance are concentrated among individuals with unobserved variables that make them unlikely attend college. This suggests that men who would benefit most from receiving college education in terms of mortality reductions are those who are not attending.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperIncome Effects in Labor Supply: Evidence from Child-Related Tax Benefits
May 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-24
A parent whose child is born in December can claim child-related tax benefits when she files her tax return a few months later. Parents of children born in January must wait more than a year before they can receive child-related tax benefits. As a result, families with December births have higher after-tax income in the first year of a child's life than otherwise similar families with January births. This paper estimates the corresponding income effect on maternal labor supply, testing whether mothers who give birth in December work and earn less in the months following birth. We use data from the American Community Survey, the Survey of Income and Program Participation, and the 2000 Decennial Census. We find that December mothers have a lower probability of working, particularly in the third month after a child's birth. Earnings data from the SIPP indicate that an additional dollar of child-related tax benefits reduces annual maternal earnings in the year following a child's birth by approximately one dollar.View Full Paper PDF
