What difference does a country make? Earnings by Soviets in the Soviet Union and in the United States

Abstract

This paper utilizes the Soviet Interview Project (SIP) and the 1990 U.S. census to identify and to track a sample of Soviet émigrés. After examining basic descriptive statistics on income mobility, we specify and estimate earnings functions to examine the impact of a variety of explanatory factors on household earnings in the Soviet Union and in the United States. We find that while the household income of émigrés from the Soviet Union increased, the degree of inequality increased significantly as did the share of this population experiencing poverty as defined by U.S. poverty norms.