Measuring Earning Assimilation: A Distributional Approach

Xiaozhou Wang, Pennsylvania State University
Glenn Firebaugh, Pennsylvania State University

This study contributes to the immigration literature by introducing a distributional measure to characterize earnings assimilation of immigrants. This new measure is considered to be advantageous over the conventional mean-based measures, as it informs us with the relative positions that immigrants take as compared to the natives at every income level of the earnings distribution. Analyzing data from CPS March Supplements with this measure we reevaluate the trends of earnings assimilation of immigrants in United States from 1994 to 2008. Findings are compared with the results obtained with the mean-based approach.