Accumulated Work Experience Research Articles

Qualifications, Discrimination, or Assimilation? An Extended Framework for Analysing Immigrant Wage Gaps

In this paper, we analyze immigrant wage gaps and propose an extension of the traditional wage decomposition technique, which is a synthesis from two strains of on ethnic/immigrant wage differences, namely the assimilation literature and the discrimination literature. We estimate separate wage equations for natives and a number of immigrant groups using panel data sample selection models. Based on the estimations, we find that the immigrant wage gap is caused by a lack of qualifications and incomplete assimilation, and that a large fraction of that gap would disappear if only immigrants could find employment and thus accumulate work experience.

Measuring the Rate of Return to Interrupted Schooling

The most widely followed technique to estimate the rate of return to a year of schooling was provided by Mincer (1974) . This paper extends Mincer's semilog wage regression method to include those who interrupted their schooling with years of work. Schooling and the duration of the interruption interact to create nonlinearities in the rate of return to schooling. The proposed method is then applied to both Vietnam era G.I. students and civilian interrupters. It is found that interrupters earn substantially the same rate of return as the rate of return to uninterrupted schooling at the same level of schooling. G.I. students earned slightly higher rates of return to their interrupted schooling, but their accumulated work experience was not valued highly in the labor market.