Using a data set that provides information on source country employment, we examine the effect of source and host country occupational matching on earnings and the economic rate of return to the foreign human capital of immigrants in Canada. Examining occupational distributions we find that immigrants converge very quickly to the skill distribution of the Canadian population in terms of the main job worked, although four years after landing they are still below the source country distribution. We also find that for a large proportion of immigrants, their intended occupation differs from their source country occupation. Although immigrants who are able to match their source and host country occupations obtain higher earnings, successful occupational matching does not have any impact on the return to foreign potential work experience. However, immigrants who match their source and host country occupations do have a higher return to schooling, particularly for females.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by UBC Department of Economics in its series CLSRN Working Papers with number
clsrn_admin-2009-30.