Author(s)
Brian Duncan, Jeffrey Grogger, Ana Sofia Leon, Stephen J. Trejo

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. Standard data sources lack information on grandparents' countries of birth, however, which creates potentially serious issues for tracking the progress of later- generation Mexican Americans. Exploiting unique NLSY97 data that address these measurement issues, we find substantial educational progress between the 2nd and 3rd generations for a recent cohort of Mexican Americans. Such progress is obscured when we instead mimic the limitations inherent in standard data sources.

JEL Codes
J61: Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers
J62: Job, Occupational, and Intergenerational Mobility; Promotion
Keywords
intergenerational mobility
immigration
educational attainment