Migration, labor and women
Creators: name: Lee, Annie Seong
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2021

description: My dissertation investigates three topics related to migration, labor, and women. The first investigates households’ migration decisions in the United States from the perspective of the information hypothesis. Much research on migration assumes a continuous, monotonic inverse relationship between distance and the propensity to migrate. But the quality and quantity of the information that circulates differ across space not only due to physical geography (e.g., mountains and rivers) but also due to the way that job information is transmitted. Thus, a strictly monotonic, inverse relationship with distance can lead only to a partial understanding of the propensity to migrate. My dissertation allows geographical discontinuities in individuals’ propensities to migrate and examines determinants of discrete movements across hierarchies of information fields. I find that the effects of the labor-market and amenities factors differ across any given individual’s hierarchy of information fields. Labor-market factors have their greatest effect on movements within potential migrants’ local labor markets compared to alternative move destinations within their job-search hierarchies. This strongly suggests that information fields are quite important when formulating migration and labor-market policies. The second topic examines whether the household responsibility hypothesis still largely explains the commutes of couple households as late as 2018. I find that the gender gap for commuting time is similar between single and couple households and that household responsibilities only tend to explain the commute differential for heterosexual couples in which men’s income quartile level is higher than that of their female partners. This implies that gender equality within households has improved significantly since the 1990s when the bulk of research on this topic was published. Still, in most households the man earns more than the woman. I also find that the gender commuting gap intensifies toward increasing men’s commute times when couples have a minor child; this is regardless of the relative education of couple members. Even though gender equality within households seems to have improved significantly by 2018, my findings suggest that a large share of women continue to take prime responsibilities of childcare and other household responsibilities. The third topic explores U.S. immigrants’ occupational mobility pattern before and after immigration. I find that U.S. immigrants’ occupational mobility follow a U-shaped pattern; The education and skills attained in their home countries are typically valued less in the United States, so the occupational status of immigrants tends to drop substantially after immigration. As they stay longer in the United States, the occupational status of immigrants gradually improves. Interestingly, I also find that the occupational status of U.S. immigrants remains lower than it was pre-immigration even after being in the U.S. for as many as nine years. Furthermore, I find that immigrant women with high occupational status are more likely to move to the U.S. than are men with equal occupational status; but it is also the case that a larger share of these women experience career setbacks upon entry into the U.S. labor market. In essence, even though immigrant women have the potential to be major economic contributors, their human capital capacity is under-utilized in the U.S. labor market. A strong economy and high demand for workers can facilitate recovery of the immigrant women’s occupational status. In the absence of a strong economy, immigrant-targeted policies such as childcare support, online job information banks, and language training are needed.