Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/35618 
Year of Publication: 
2009
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 3964
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
This paper derives original series of average years of schooling in the United States 1870-1930, which take into account the impact of mass migrations on the US educational level. We reconstruct the foreign-born US population by age and by country of origin, while combining data on the flow of migrants by country and the age pyramids of migrants by country. Then we use original data on educational attainment in the nineteenth century presented in Morrisson and Murtin (2008) in order to estimate the educational level of US immigrants by age and by country. As a result, our series are consistent with the first national estimates of average schooling in 1940. We show that mass migrations have had a significant but modest impact on the US average educational attainment. However, the educational gap between US natives and immigrants was large and increased with the second immigration wave, a phenomenon that most likely fostered the implementation of restrictive immigration rules in the 1920s.
Subjects: 
Education
migrations
economic history
economic development research
JEL: 
I2
J24
N70
O1
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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