We examine the impact of the Americanization of names on the labor market outcomes of migrants. We construct a novel longitudinal data set of naturalization records in which we track a complete sample of migrants who naturalize by 1930. We find that migrants who Americanized their names experienced larger occupational upgrading. Some, such as those who changed to very popular American names like John or William, obtained gains in occupationbased earnings of at least 14%. We show that these estimates are causal effects by using an index of linguistic complexity based on Scrabble points as an instrumental variable that predicts name Americanization. We conclude that the tradeoff between individual identity and labor market success was present since the early making of modern America
JEL CLASSIFICATIONJ61, J62, Z1, N32
KEYWORDSAmericanization, names, assimilation, migration
EDITORIAL NOTEDr Costanza Biavaschi is a Research Associate and Deputy Program Director for the Migration Area at the Institute for the Study of Labor, Germany. Costanza's research interests are in labor economics and applied econometrics, with a focus on return migration, the dynamics of migration choices, and the selection of migrants.Dr Corrado Giulietti is Director of Research at the Institute for the Study of Labor, Germany. Corrado is also a Research Associate of the ESRC Centre for Population Change. His research interests are labor economics and applied econometrics, with a focus on the determinants of migration, the labor market and welfare effects of migration, the assimilation of immigrants, and the estimation of migration flows.Dr Zahra Siddique is a Lecturer in economics at the University of Reading, UK. Zahra's research interests are in micro-econometrics, labor economics and development economics.
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ESRC Centre for Population ChangeThe ESRC Centre for Population Change (CPC) is a joint initiative between the Universities of Southampton, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Stirling, Strathclyde, in partnership with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the National Records of Scotland (NRS). The Centre is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grant numbers RES-625-28-0001 and ES/K007394/1. This working paper series publishes independent research, not always funded through the Centre. The views and opinions expressed by authors do not necessarily reflect those of the CPC, ESRC, ONS or NRS.Website | Email | Twitter | Facebook | Mendeley
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSThe authors would like to thank participants at the 10th IZA Annual Migration Meeting, the 4th TEMPO conference on international migration, the Essex Fresh meeting as well as seminar participants at IZA, the University of Reading, Tsinghua University and the University of Southampton for their helpful comments. This draft has greatly benefitted from comments by Benjamin Elsner, Lidia Farré, Jesús Fernández-Huertas Moraga, Daniel Hamermesh, Carolyn Moehling, Andrew Oswald, Núria Rodríguez-Planas, Todd Sorensen, Derek Stemple, Christopher Taber, and Konstantinos Ta...