Substitution between Individual and Source Country Characteristics: Social Capital, Culture And, Us Labor Market Outcomes among Immigrant Women *

In this paper we use data from the New Immigrant Survey to investigate the impact of immigrant women's own labor supply prior to migrating and female labor supply in their source country on their labor supply and wages in the United States to provide evidence on the roles of culture and social capital. We find, as expected, that women who migrate from countries with relatively high levels of female labor supply work more in the United States. Moreover, most of this effect remains when we further control for each woman's own labor supply prior to migrating, which itself also strongly positively affects their labor supply in the United States. Interestingly, we find a significantly negative interaction between pre-migration labor supply and source country female labor supply. We obtain broadly similar effects analyzing the determinants of hourly earnings among the employed, although the results are not always significant. The negative interaction effects between pre-migration work experience and source country female labor supply on women's US work hours and wages suggest that broader culture and social capital can act as substitutes for individual job-related experience in affecting immigrant women's labor market preparedness and work orientation. We also show that, given plausible values of labor supply elasticities, most of the impact of source country female labor supply is not due to its impact on wages, suggesting that culture rather than social capital is the primary factor accounting for the source country effect.