Volume 35, Number 3 (Summer) 2000
Gang, Ira N. and Klaus F. Zimmermann. 2000. "Is Child Like Parent? Educational Attainment and Ethnic Origin." Journal of Human Resources 35(3):550-569.
The speed at which immigrants assimilate is the subject of debate. Human capital formation plays a major role in this discussion. We compare second generation immigrants' educational attainments to those of similarly aged natives. Evidence from German data suggests ethnicity matters: ethnic network size has a positive effect on educational attainment, and a clear pattern is exhibited between countries-of-origin and education even in the second generation. For children of the foreign-born, parental schooling plays no role in educational choices. For Germans, contrary to the literature's general findings, there is a statistically significant difference in favor of father's over mother's education.
Ira N. Gang is a professor of economics at Rutgers University and a research fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn. Klaus F. Zimmermann is a professor of economics at Bonn University, director of the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, president of the Detsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW) in Berlin, and program director of Labour Economics at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)in London. This paper was written while Ira N. Gang was visiting Germany under the auspices of an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship and a Rutgers Competitive Fellowship leave and substantially revised while Klaus F. Zimmermann was a Dartmouth-German Distinguished Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College. The authors thank these organizations for their financial support, John Haisken-DeNew for excellent research assistance and Gail M. Alterman for her comments. They are also grateful to an anonymous referee, Thomas Bauer, Francisco Rivera-Batiz, and various seminar participants for many helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts. The data used in this article is a subset ofd the GSOEP which is available as outlined in Wagner, Burkhauser, and Behringer (1993). Our sample can be obtained beginning March 2001 through February 2004 from Klaus F. Zimmermann, IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53113 Bonn, Germany.
© 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X