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The transmission of women’s fertility, human capital, and work orientation across immigrant generations

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Abstract

Using the 1995–2011 March Current Population Survey and 1970–2000 Census data, we find that the fertility, education, and labor supply of second-generation women (US-born women with at least one foreign-born parent) are significantly positively affected by the immigrant generation’s levels of these variables, with the effect of the fertility and labor supply of women from the mother’s source country generally larger than that of women from the father’s source country and the effect of the education of men from the father’s source country larger than that of women from the mother’s source country. We present some evidence that suggests our findings for fertility and labor supply are due at least in part to intergenerational transmission of gender roles. Transmission rates for immigrant fertility and labor supply between generations are higher than for education, but there is considerable intergenerational assimilation toward native levels for all three of these outcomes.

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Notes

  1. In 1990, 13% of U.S. children (ages 0–17) had at least one immigrant parent; this had increased to nearly one quarter (23%) by 2008 (Fortuny 2010).

  2. In a recent paper, Alesina et al. (2011) test the hypothesis that traditional agricultural practices, namely the utilization of plough agriculture, influenced the development of this culture across societies. In one application they find evidence of cultural transmission, based on the use of the plough in the source country, for second-generation immigrants in the United States.

  3. When both parents were foreign-born, the 1970 Census reported only the father’s country of birth. While Card et al. (2000) used the same CPS data we do for their recent cohort (although for fewer years), they used information only on the father’s country of birth in order to make their analysis of 1970 to 1994–1996 assimilation consistent with their 1940 to 1970 analysis.

  4. However, Gang and Zimmermann (2000) found that parental education did matter for native-born Germans and that fathers’ education had a larger effect than mothers’.

  5. In a working paper version of Fernández and Fogli (2009), the authors examined the impact of their source country variables for men’s hours worked and presence of children and did not find an effect (see, Fernández and Fogli 2005).

  6. To the extent that the number of children present differs from fertility—e.g., older children may have left home, our control for age addresses this issue, since older women are more likely than younger women to have had children that are no longer in the household.

  7. Results were similar when we used age 14.

  8. Card et al. (2000) also age-adjusted immigrant and second-generation outcomes.

  9. In addition to having fewer years of the CPS available, Card et al. were also limited by the need to maintain comparability with the 1940 Census data. Note that, although Puerto Rico is a US territory, it is treated as a foreign birth place for the purposes of our analyses.

  10. In order to make the CPS and Census data comparable, natives are defined as all US-born women regardless of parental birthplace in Table 1. However, the means for natives with native parents for 2000 from the CPS data (results not shown) are virtually identical to the means for all natives for 2000.

  11. Second-generation men’s schooling and labor supply levels are also very similar to natives (Appendix).

  12. The Middle East, which is located partially in Asia and partially in the Northern Africa, is not included in Asia. With only 578 second-generation women from the Middle East we do not include it as a separate region in Table 2.

  13. Fernández and Fogli (2009) excluded women with fathers born in Russia or countries that became centrally planned around World War II, as well as countries with fewer than 15 observations.

  14. Beginning in 1994, the CPS coded education in categories, as did the 2000 Census. We mapped these into years of schooling attained by using Jaeger’s (1997) suggested algorithm.

  15. Chiswick (1988) and Gang and Zimmermann (2000) postulate that parental cultural differences in preferences may play a role in ethnic differences in educational outcomes.

  16. Among respondents who have an immigrant mother, the correlation between the schooling of immigrant men and women from the mother’s source country is 0.98; for respondents with an immigrant father, the comparable correlation is also 0.98.

  17. Note that these studies do include extensive controls for the respondent’s individual characteristics.

  18. A small number of non-Hispanic individuals of other races (0.46% of the sample) were omitted.

  19. Our summed transmission effects in the matching specification for women and men (see Table 4 for men) of 0.45–0.46 are similar to the effects obtained by Card et al. (2000) of about 0.4 for educational transmission, although they used information only on the father.

  20. Blau et al. (2011) show the native-immigrant labor supply gap increased 32% among married women.

  21. We also examined the impact of contemporary (2000) source country characteristics on these outcomes. We found statistically significant positive effects for both mother’s and father’s participation rate ratios on respondent’s annual hours, and for their sum. The effects of mother’s and father’s source country fertility on current fertility were positive, but not statistically significant; the sum of the coefficients on these variables was also insignificant.

  22. Specifically, for second-generation women with both parents foreign born, the correlation between mom_f_edn and dad_m_edn is 0.924; between mom_f_nchild and dad_f_nchild 0.942; and between mom_f_hours and dad_f_hours 0.956.

  23. The 1994 CPS is not included because fewer source countries are listed than in later years. U.S. citizens who were born abroad to native parents are not included since they may have lived abroad during their formative years.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Cornell University, 258 Ives Hall, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA

    Francine D. Blau & Lawrence M. Kahn

  2. Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., 505 14th Street, Suite 800, Oakland, CA, 94612, USA

    Albert Yung-Hsu Liu

  3. Department of Economics, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK

    Kerry L. Papps

Authors
  1. Francine D. Blau
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  2. Lawrence M. Kahn
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  3. Albert Yung-Hsu Liu
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  4. Kerry L. Papps
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lawrence M. Kahn.

Additional information

Responsible editor: Klaus F. Zimmermann

We are indebted for helpful comments and suggestions to Susan Dynarski, Klaus Zimmermann, two anonymous referees, and participants at the Society of Labor Economists meetings in Boston, May 2009; the Midwest Economics Association Meetings in St Louis, March 2011; the Centre of Equality, Social Organization, and Performance (ESOP) Workshop on Gender and Households in Oslo, May 2011; the IZA/CEPR 13th European Summer Symposium in Labour Economics in Buch, Ammersee, September 2011; the Broom Center Workshop on “Gender and Family in the New Millennium,” University of California, Santa Barbara, March 2012; and seminars at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) and Yale Law School. We thank Peter Brummund for excellent research assistance, and the Russell Sage Foundation for financial support. Portions of the research for this paper were completed while Blau and Kahn were Visiting Fellows in the Economics Department of Princeton University, supported by the Industrial Relations Section.

Appendix

Appendix

In this appendix we provide additional information about our data. Immigrant parent characteristics by source country are estimated using the 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 Census public use microdata samples obtained from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). The 1970 data is a combination of the 1% Form 1 state sample, the 1% Form 1 metropolitan area sample, the Form 2 state sample, and the Form 2 metropolitan area sample; the 1980, 1990, and 2000 data are the 5% state samples. We take a 1% random sample of households where all members are white and native-born and retain the full sample of all other respondents. Means of parent characteristics for each source country and Census year are adjusted to age 40 based on a model including source country fixed effects, age, age squared, the interaction of immigrant and age, and the interaction of immigrant and age squared. The regression sample for mothers (fathers) consists of women (men) between ages 18 and 64, excluding people of other race, with an allocated source country, or from a country that does not correspond to the set of countries available in the CPS.Footnote 23 Selected means for natives with native parents and for secondgeneration immigrants are shown in Table 9.

Table 9 Selected means for women and men: natives and second-generation individuals, 1995–2011
Full size table

Second-generation immigrants in the CPS are matched to their immigrant “parents” in the Census by source country based on the year when the respondent was 10 years old. If this year is exactly a Census year (1970, 1980, 1990, or 2000), we use data from that Census. If it is an interior year, we use linear interpolation to compute a weighted average between the two nearest Censuses. For example, if the respondent was 10 years old in 1984, the parent characteristics would be a weighted average of the estimates from 1980 (0.6 weight) and 1990 (0.4 weight). If the respondent was 10 years old before 1970, we use immigrant parent characteristics from 1970. Since we use an age range of 25–49 for our second-generation sample, every respondent turned 10 years old before 2000.

Sources for the country variables shown in Table 7 were: fertility: total fertility rate was taken from United Nations Statistics Division-UNSD-(2006a), GDP per capita: UNSD (2006b), population data from UNSD (2006c); female/male labor force participation rate: economic activity rate for ages 15 and up from UNSD (2006d, e); and primary and secondary female school enrollment rates from World Bank (2006a, b). GDP per capita was collected annually, the remaining variables were collected at five or ten year intervals and interpolated annually; see also Blau et al. (2011) (Table 9).

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Blau, F.D., Kahn, L.M., Liu, A.YH. et al. The transmission of women’s fertility, human capital, and work orientation across immigrant generations. J Popul Econ 26, 405–435 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-012-0424-x

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