Faithin Omaha eBook Collection

Download or read book The effect of literacy on immigrant earnings written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Green and Riddell (2003) argue that the types of literacy questions asked in the IALS are particularly conducive to using the literacy test scores as measures of cognitive skills possessed by the respondent at the time of the survey. [...] The combination of this return to literacy and the lower literacy levels of immigrants explains part of the immigrant earnings differential. [...] However, because G1i is observed and included as an explanatory variable, the quasi-reduced form coefficients no longer reflect the contribution of education and experience to the production of literacy skills and the contribution of literacy skills to earnings. [...] Rather, they reflect the contribution of education and experience to the production of the unobserved skills G2 and G3, and the impact of these unobserved skills on earnings.4 The quasi-reduced form equation (4) is our starting point for estimation. [...] Figure 1(a) plots the kernel density function of the individual averages of the document and quantitative literacy scores.13 The immigrant distribution is bi-modal with a main mode near the mode in the native born distribution and a smaller, though still substantial mode, near the bottom of the distribution.14 The smoothing inherent in the kernel estimator makes it appear that there is mass across.