{"title":"Home Country Work Experience and Immigrant Self-Employment in the United States","authors":"Alejandro Gutierrez-Li","doi":"10.1177/01979183241262966","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Immigrant entrepreneurship in the United States has grown steadily in the last four decades. In this paper, I study the occupational choices of legal permanent residents and their associated earnings in paid and self-employment. Using a unique data set with pre- and postmigration individual-level information, I analyze the role of home country work experience of immigrants in their probability of becoming entrepreneurs and their earnings after migration. To control for endogenous sector selection in the estimation of earnings distributions, I follow a novel identification strategy based on extremal quantile regressions that does not require exclusion restrictions or a large support variable. I find that foreign work experience in paid and self-employment is an important predictor of entrepreneurship after migration. In addition, it impacts earnings in the United States but differently across sectors, controlling for human capital, assimilation, time, region of origin, U.S. destination, previous migratory status, and demographic characteristics. Overall, my results highlight the role played by immigrants’ labor market history from their home countries to better understand their outcomes in the United States.","PeriodicalId":48229,"journal":{"name":"International Migration Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3000,"publicationDate":"2024-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"International Migration Review","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/01979183241262966","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"DEMOGRAPHY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Immigrant entrepreneurship in the United States has grown steadily in the last four decades. In this paper, I study the occupational choices of legal permanent residents and their associated earnings in paid and self-employment. Using a unique data set with pre- and postmigration individual-level information, I analyze the role of home country work experience of immigrants in their probability of becoming entrepreneurs and their earnings after migration. To control for endogenous sector selection in the estimation of earnings distributions, I follow a novel identification strategy based on extremal quantile regressions that does not require exclusion restrictions or a large support variable. I find that foreign work experience in paid and self-employment is an important predictor of entrepreneurship after migration. In addition, it impacts earnings in the United States but differently across sectors, controlling for human capital, assimilation, time, region of origin, U.S. destination, previous migratory status, and demographic characteristics. Overall, my results highlight the role played by immigrants’ labor market history from their home countries to better understand their outcomes in the United States.
期刊介绍:
International Migration Review is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal created to encourage and facilitate the study of all aspects of sociodemographic, historical, economic, political, legislative and international migration. It is internationally regarded as the principal journal in the field facilitating study of international migration, ethnic group relations, and refugee movements. Through an interdisciplinary approach and from an international perspective, IMR provides the single most comprehensive forum devoted exclusively to the analysis and review of international population movements.