Post-Communist immigration: testing the selection hypotheses for immigrants in the US and EU
1105.ris
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Octet Stream,
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The end of the Soviet Union and communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe provide a unique opportunity for the analysis of immigrant selection, or who chose to emigrate compared to who didn’t, over time. In this paper I analyze immigrant selection before and after the fall of the Soviet Union within a Roy Model framework. With micro-level data from Russia, Ukraine, and Bulgaria, along with data for immigrants in the United States, Spain, and Greece, I compare immigrants’ predicted wages in the source country with the predicted wages of their native counterparts for both the communist and post-communist periods. I also use the Dinardo, Fortin, and Lemieux (1996)re-weighting method to weight the source country (Russia, Ukraine, and Bulgaria) wage distributions by the characteristics of immigrants in host countries. These
approaches allow me to see what part of the source country distribution immigrants would fall in had they not emigrated, providing a measure of immigrant selection. I find evidence of positive selection for the US, and negative selection for Greece and Spain after the fall of the Soviet Union. Using retrospective data from Ukraine from 1986, I find that selection among Soviet men in the US was intermediate and selection among women was positive.
CONF
UCLA Europe’s Borderlands Conference & Harvard-Manchester Summer Workshop on Immigration
Ganguli, Ina
2008
UCLA Center for European and Eurasian Studies Best Western Moorside Grange Hotel, Higher Disley, UK.
1105
