Ethnic attrition, assimilation, and the measured health outcomes of Mexican Americans.

The literature on immigrant assimilation and intergenerational progress has sometimes reached surprising conclusions, such as the puzzle of immigrant advantage which finds that Hispanic immigrants sometimes have better health than US-born Hispanics. While numerous studies have attempted to explain these patterns, almost all studies rely on subjective measures of ethnic self-identification to identify immigrants' descendants. This can lead to bias due to "ethnic attrition," which occurs whenever a US-born descendant of a Hispanic immigrant fails to self-identify as Hispanic.

New evidence of generational progress for Mexican Americans.

U.S.-born Mexican Americans suffer a large schooling deficit relative to other Americans, and standard data sources suggest that this deficit does not shrink between the 2nd and later generations.

Identifying the Later-Generation Descendants of U.S. Immigrants: Issues Arising from Selective Ethnic Attrition.

Evaluating the long-term socioeconomic integration of immigrants in the United States requires analyses of differences between foreign-born and U.S.-born residents, as well as analyses across generations of the U.

The Complexity of Immigrant Generations: Implications for Assessing the Socioeconomic Integration of Hispanics and Asians.

Because of data limitations, virtually all studies of the later-generation descendants of immigrants rely on subjective measures of ethnic self-identification rather than arguably more objective measures based on the countries of birth of the respondent and his ancestors. In this context, biases can arise from "ethnic attrition" (e.g.

Immigrant employment and earnings growth in Canada and the USA: evidence from longitudinal data.

We study the short-term trajectories of employment, hours worked, and real wages of immigrants in Canada and the U.S. using nationally representative longitudinal datasets covering 1996-2008.

How do immigrants spend their time? The process of assimilation.

Sharp differences in time use by nativity emerge when activities are distinguished by incidence and intensity in recent U.S. data.

Intermarriage and the Intergenerational Transmission of Ethnic Identity and Human Capital for Mexican Americans.

We investigate whether selective intermarriage and endogenous ethnic identification interact to hide some of the intergenerational progress achieved by the Mexican-origin population in the United States. In part, we do this by comparing an "objective" indicator of Mexican descent (based on the countries of birth of the respondent and his parents and grandparents) with the standard "subjective" measure of Mexican self-identification (based on the respondent's answer to the Hispanic origin question). For third-generation Mexican-American youth, we show that ethnic attrition is substantial and could produce significant downward bias in standard measures of attainment which rely on ethnic self-identification.