analyzing economic attainment patterns of foreign born latin american male immigrants to the united states: an example using hierarchical linear modeling

The paper presents the research which examines and endeavors to account for variation in the economic attainments of immigrants to the United States from Latin America, through the use of Hierarchical Linear Modeling. When analyzing this variation, researchers typically choose between two competing explanations. Human capital theory contends that variation in economic attainment is a product of different characteristics of individuals. Social capital theory contends that variation in economic attainment is a product of differences in characteristics of the societies from which the workers come. The author's central thesis is that we need not choose between human and social capital theories, that we can rely on both theoretical approaches, that it is an empirical and not a theoretical question how much variation can be explained by one set of factors versus the other. The real problem then is to build an appropriate methodology that allows us to partition the variation in economic attainments, identifying how much is explained by individual and how much by group characteristics. Using a multi-level modeling technique, this research presents such a methodology.