This book examines the role of immigration policy, and of economic and social policies involved in promoting the settlement of immigrants to Australia. It is based on research of two groups of recent immigrants who arrived six years apart during the 1990s holding a range of family reunion, skill...

This paper analyzes the sources of disparities in the relative wealth position of Mexican Americans. Results reveal that wealth gaps are in large part not the result of differences in conditional expected wealth functions. Similarly, income differentials are important, but do not play the...

Census data for 1990/91 indicate that Australian and Canadian female immigrants have higher levels of English fluency, education (relative to native-born women), and income (relative to native-born women) than do U.S. female immigrants. A prominent explanation for this skill deficit of U.S....

We study the work hours of Australian couples, using a neoclassical labour-supply model in which couples choose from a small, realistic set of possible wife-husband working hour combinations We introduce three improvements to this standard model. First, we allow partners' preferences about...

The family investment hypothesis predicts that credit-constrained immigrant families adopt a household strategy for financing post-migration human capital investment in which the partner with labor market comparative advantage engages in investment activities and the other partner undertakes...

This paper examines the effect of neighborhood diversity on the nativity gap in homevalue appreciation in Australia. Specifically, immigrant homeowners experienced a 41.7 percent increase in median home values between 2001 and 2006, while the median value of housing owned by the native-born...

This paper analyzes the relationship between immigrants' retirement status and the prevalence of return migration from the host country to their country of origin. We develop a simple theoretical model to illustrate that under reasonable conditions the probability of return migration is...

This paper examines whether men's and women's noncognitive skills influence their occupational attainment and, if so, whether this contributes to the disparity in their relative wages. We find that noncognitive skills have a substantial effect on the probability of employment in many, though not...

We analyze the effect of growing up on welfare on young people's involvement in a variety of social and health risks. Young people in welfare families are much more likely to take both social and health risks. Much of the apparent link between family welfare history and risk taking disappears,...

This paper analyzes the sources of disparities in the relative wealth position of Mexican Americans. Results reveal that—unlike the racial wealth gap— Mexican Americans’ wealth disadvantage is in large part not the result of differences in wealth distributions conditional on the underlying...