Third Year Hon. Mention: Changes in educational composition and average earnings of Italian immigrants and U.S.-born workers from 1960 to 2010

ECON 3249, Labour Economics (Writing). CD: Matias Cortes.

Abstract

The report effectively summarizes a data set and insightfully deploys the data therein to compare educational attainment and average earnings between Italian immigrants and people born in the United States from 1960 through 2010. The report describes both the available data and the reporter’s analytic methodology with remarkable clarity. And, as the assignment requires, the author illuminates their analysis with six graphs—both bar and line—that do exactly what graphs are supposed to do: communicate the relations among the data in visuals that are immediately apprehensible. The graphs are visually appealing, and are labelled and legended in ways that encourage comprehension. They provide an ideal complement to the text’s cogent analysis, an account that is both concisely and elegantly written.