Immigration and Its Effects on Education, Income, and Families

Download or read book Immigration and Its Effects on Education, Income, and Families written by Ji Hyun Park and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the effects of immigration on education, income and inequality, and marriage market? Migrants consists a large share of the population in the U.S. and they are a small but expanding group in South Korea. Studies have investigated the effect of immigration on various fields such as the labor market, but there are many aspects of life that the effects have not been explored. My dissertation research explores the effect of immigration on choosing a major in college education, matching between workers and managers, and choosing a spouse. First chapter analyzes the effect of country of origin on the college major choice of second generation immigrants. I use the American Community Survey (ACS) 2009-2013 as primary dataset and focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) major. I use the immigrants who are born in a foreign country and migrated to the U.S. between age 0 and 16 as proxy for second generation immigrants. Using random effects model and controlling for age of arrival, I estimate the effect of each country of origin on choosing a STEM major and decompose the country-specific. Results show that immigrant children from many countries are significantly more likely to choose a STEM major compared to natives. Decomposition shows that selection into migration is more important than the origin country characteristics, and immigrant children are more likely to choose a STEM major when there was a stronger positive selection for the parent cohort immigrants. Second chapter with Jaerim Choi studies the effect of inflow of immigrants on wages and inequality of natives. Adopting the worker-manager matching model from the trade literature, I set up a model where inflow of immigrants changes the matching between workers and managers. As a consequence, native workers and native managers with heterogeneous skill levels are affected differently through changes in the match ratio and the match quality. This impacts wages and inequality of natives. Using the U.S. Census and American Community Survey, I empirically test the model with inflow of immigrants in the U.S. 1980-2010. Using a shift-share instrumental variable for the stock of immigrants, I find that inflow of low-skilled immigrants affects native workers through the change in match quality. Consistent with the theory, inequality within native workers increases. Third chapter investigates the effect of marriage subsidy on the marriage in South Korea. The marriage subsidy, which was targeted for international marriage between Korean men and foreign women, raises the incentive for international marriage. Using the administrative marriage record for periods 2004-2013 and exploiting the variation in the subsidy across regions and years, I find that the marriage subsidy has significant positive effect on the probability of a single man marrying a foreign woman. The crowd out effect from marrying a native woman is shown in some cases.