This dissertation examines employment, earnings, and income of the six major foreign and native born Asian groups, namely, Asian Indians, Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, Koreans, and the Vietnamese for the year 2000. The dissertation makes three contributions. First, it provides an updated analysis of employment and earning attainments of Asian individuals disaggregated by countries of origin, gender, and nativity status using the latest available and most suitable data. Second, it explores the use of a non-parametric technique, namely reweighting, to assess the earning gaps between Asians and whites. Third, it analyzes intergroup variations in household income, inclination to pool resources, and factors associated with the likelihood of forming nuclear living arrangements.

Descriptive statistics document the high average levels of employment, earnings, and human capital attainments for Asian men and women relative to whites. There are, however, notable subgroup differences: foreign born Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and native born Vietnamese have below average attainment. The estimates from the multivariate framework, on the contrary, indicate a relative Asian earning disadvantage. The multivariate and reweighting analyses show that foreign born Asian men and women experience greater disadvantage relative to whites than the native born Asian men and women. The gender comparisons indicate that being native born as compared to being foreign born is more beneficial for Asian women than men in the labor market, with native born Asian women experiencing higher earnings than white women. Additionally, there is evidence of a 'glass ceiling' among Asian men.

With regard to the household level analysis, the descriptive associations show that the economic position of Asian relative to white households depend on the specific measure of household income employed. Asian households experience similar or higher levels of total household income and income per labor hour employed but lower levels of per capita income than white households. The results also suggest a higher inclination to pool resources among the foreign born relative to the native born Asian and white households. Intergroup comparisons indicate that the foreign born Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese households have a greater tendency to share and pool resources than the foreign born Indians and the Japanese. Multivariate analyses point towards a positive relationship between the householder's earnings, education, and length of stay and the likelihood of living in nuclear relative to nonnuclear living arrangements. The overall findings from this dissertation suggest that - at both the individual and household levels, the differences between the foreign born and the native born Asian groups are more significant than the intergroup variations among Asians.