Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/299418 
Year of Publication: 
2024
Series/Report no.: 
IDB Working Paper Series No. IDB-WP-01586
Publisher: 
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Washington, DC
Abstract: 
We investigate the assimilation of immigrant youth in Ecuador. Focusing on formal schooling and employing administrative data from high schools, we document subtle ways by which assessment biases against students with an immigrant background play a significant role in this assimilation process. We find that, after holding constant performance on blindly scored proficiency tests, teacher-assigned grades in Mathematics and Spanish are consistently lower for students from immigrant families. We show that these results are robust with respect to the omission of socio-emotional and behavioral traits that are likely valued by teachers. These differentials are larger for male students and those attending urban schools. While these grading differentials have direct impact over high school graduation rates, they may also discourage future human capital investments, potentially leading to lower college attendance, distorted choice of major, and suboptimal labor market outcomes, which are all well know elements for the economic assimilation of immigrants.
Subjects: 
Immigration assimilation
human capital
teacher discrimination
grading bias
JEL: 
I24
J15
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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