Family Matters: The Role of the Family in Immigrants' Destination Language Acquisition

This paper is concerned with the relationship among family members in the determinants of destination language proficiency among immigrants. A model of immigrant language proficiency is augmented to include dynamics among family members. It is tested using data on a sample of recent immigrants. Children are shown to have a negative effect on their mother?s language proficiency, but no effect on their father?s. There is a substantial positive correlation between the language skills of spouses. This is due to the correlation between spouses in both the measured determinants and the unmeasured determinants of destination language skills among spouses

The Determinants of the Geographic Concentration among Immigrants: Application to Australia

This study develops a theoretical framework for the study of the tendency for immigrant groups to be geographically concentrated. Testing the model for Australia shows that the extent of geographic concentration of immigrant groups is negatively related to age at migration, duration of residence in Australia and the proportion of the birthplace group that is fluent in English. The extent of geographic concentration is also affected by the availability of ethnic media and the distance between the country of origin and the place of residence in Australia

Schooling, Literacy, Numeracy and Labor Market Success

This paper uses data from the 1996 Australian Survey of Aspects of Literacy to examine the effects on labour market outcomes of literacy, numeracy and educational attainment. The survey includes a range of literacy and numeracy variables that are highly inter-correlated. A ?general to specific? approach identifies the most relevant literacy and numeracy variables. Including the others adds little explanatory power. Among males and females separately about half of the total effect of education on labour force participation and on unemployment can be attributed to literacy and numeracy (the indirect effect) and about half to the direct effect of education. There is apparently no indirect effect of labour market experience through literacy and numeracy on participation or unemployment. The direct and total effects of experience are the same. The findings suggest that education is a value added process in which skills, including literacy and numeracy, are improved and that these skills enhance labour market outcomes

Immigrant selection systems and immigrant health

This paper is an analysis of the determinants of self-reported health status of immigrants, with a particular focus on type of visa used to gain admission. The concept of health capital and an immigrant selection and adjustment model are employed. The empirical analysis uses the three waves of the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia (panel I). Immigrant health is greater for immigrants who are younger, more educated, male, more proficient in English, and living outside of an immigrant ethnic enclave. Immigrant health is poorest for refugees and best for independent (economic) migrants, and declines with duration in the destination. There is, therefore, evidence for favorable selectivity on the basis of health status among family and especially independent migrants, as well as a tendency toward regression to the mean with duration in the destination

Immigrants' Language Skills and Visa Category

This paper is concerned with the determinants of English language proficiency among immigrants in a longitudinal survey for Australia. It focuses on both visa category and variables derived from an economic model of the determinants of destination language proficiency among immigrants. Skills tested and economic immigrants have the greatest proficiency shortly after immigration, followed by family-based visa recipients, with refugees having the lowest proficiency. These differences disappear by 3 – years after immigration for speaking skills, but they persist for reading and writing skills. The variables generated from the model of destination language proficiency are in part predictions of visa category and are more important statistically for explaining proficiency. The effects of some variables on language skills increase with duration in these longitudinal data. In particular, the efficiency variable, age, and gender, which may be reflecting differences in labor market attachment, increase in importance over time

Immigrants' Language Skills: The Australian Experience in a Longitudinal Survey

This paper is concerned with the determinants of English language proficiency (speaking, reading and writing) among immigrants. It presents a model of immigrant destination language acquisition based on economic incentives, exposure to the destination language, and efficiency in second language acquisition. A unique data set, the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia, is used to test the model. This survey had three waves, at about 6 months, 18 months and 3? years after immigration. The analyses are performed by wave, type of language skill and gender using probit analysis. Bivariate probit analysis is used across waves. The hypotheses are supported by the data. The bivariate probit analysis indicates a positive correlation in the unexplained component that declines with time between waves, indicating a regression to the mean in English language proficiency

Longitudinal Analysis of Immigrant Occupational Mobility: A Test of the Immigrant Assimilation Hypothesis

Using an immigrant assimilation framework, this paper develops a model of the occupational mobility of immigrants and tests the hypotheses using data on adult males from the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia. The theoretical model generates hypotheses regarding a U-shaped pattern of occupational mobility from the ?last job? in the origin, to the ?first job? in the destination, to subsequent jobs in the destination, and regarding the depth of the ?U.? The survey includes data on pre-immigration occupation, the ?first? occupation in Australia (at 6 months) and the occupation after about 3.5 years in Australia. The hypotheses are supported by the empirical analysis

Transductive Ordinal Regression

Ordinal regression is commonly formulated as a multi-class problem with ordinal constraints. The challenge of designing accurate classifiers for ordinal regression generally increases with the number of classes involved, due to the large number of labeled patterns that are needed. The availability of ordinal class labels, however, is often costly to calibrate or difficult to obtain. Unlabeled patterns, on the other hand, often exist in much greater abundance and are freely available. To take benefits from the abundance of unlabeled patterns, we present a novel transductive learning paradigm for ordinal regression in this paper, namely Transductive Ordinal Regression (TOR). The key challenge of the present study lies in the precise estimation of both the ordinal class label of the unlabeled data and the decision functions of the ordinal classes, simultaneously. The core elements of the proposed TOR include an objective function that caters to several commonly used loss functions casted in transductive settings, for general ordinal regression. A label swapping scheme that facilitates a strictly monotonic decrease in the objective function value is also introduced. Extensive numerical studies on commonly used benchmark datasets including the real world sentiment prediction problem are then presented to showcase the characteristics and efficacies of the proposed transductive ordinal regression. Further, comparisons to recent state-of-the-art ordinal regression methods demonstrate the introduced transductive learning paradigm for ordinal regression led to the robust and improved performance

An Analysis of Individual Tax Morale for Russia: Before and After Flat Tax Reform

This paper examines individual tax morale in Russia before and after the introduction of flat tax reform in 2001. The World Values (WVS) and European Values Survey (EVS) are used to compare individual tax morale in 1999, 2006 and 2011. An ordered probit regression model is applied to study the effects of socio-demographic and institutional variables on individual tax morale. A new variable for employment sector that appeared in 2006 and 2011 values surveys is included in our model. The probit regression results revealed significant coefficients for income scale and the employment sector variables with negative marginal effects on tax morale. Socio-demographic variables have varying effects on tax morale while institutional variables are positively related to individual tax morale for the three years. To detect linear trend associations, Mantel-Haenszel hypothesis test results indicate that individual tax morale for Russia has not changed in the years before and after flat tax reform

Responses of Astrocytes in Culture After Low Dose Laser Irradiation

The effect of Helium-Neon low dose laser on astrocytes was investigated in cultures of isolated astrocytes from albino neonatal rats. The laser appeared to inhibit the growth of astrocytes as exemplified by the smaller sizes of the cells and the decreased leucine uptake in each cell after treatment. Temporary decrease in the number of mitoses was also observed, but this trend was reversed soon after. Electron microscopic studies revealed an increase in buddings from cell bodies and processes (branches) after irradiation