Marie Labussière presented the paper "Timing of citizenship acquisition and immigrants’ children educational outcomes: a family fixed-effects approach" at the 2021 Spring meeting of the International Sociological Association, organised by the research committee 28 "Social Stratification". The conference took place online on June 2-4, 2021, and was held under the theme of “Accumulation and compensation of inequalities”.
Abstract Various studies suggest a positive effect of host country citizenship on the educational outcomes of immigrants’ children. However, little is known about when and for whom citizenship matters and how much this is affected by potential endogeneity in the relation between parental citizenship acquisition and their children’s educational outcomes. Focusing on the Netherlands, this paper exploits siblings’ variation in their exposure to naturalisation in order to net out the effect of time-constant parental characteristics. Results from a linear mixed model show that children who acquire Dutch citizenship have a substantial advantage in terms of academic performance over those who are still foreign citizens, especially if they naturalised in early childhood. A novel bounding estimator that gauges the sensitivity of the estimates to omitted variable bias confirms the robustness of these results. Moreover, the effects of citizenship are concentrated among students whose parents are at a disadvantage in the labour market and housing market, shedding light on hitherto under-explored effect heterogeneity. These findings not only show an independent effect of host country citizenship: they also provide new analytical insights into the factors that condition the relevance of citizenship for second generation children.
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MiLifeStatus has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 682626)
