Business Highlights – Study: Light-skinned immigrants earn more than darker-skinned

Joni Hersch, a law and economics professor at Vanderbilt University, looked at a government survey of 2,084 legal immigrants to the United States from around the world and found that those with the lightest skin earned an average of 8 percent to 15 percent more than similar immigrants with much darker skin.

“On average, being one shade lighter has about the same effect as having an additional year of education,” Hersch said.

The study also found that taller immigrants earn more than shorter ones, with an extra inch of height associated with a 1 percent increase in income.

Other researchers said the findings are consistent with other studies on color and point to a skin-tone prejudice that goes beyond race.

Hersch took into consideration other factors that could affect wages, such as English-language proficiency, education, occupation, race or country of origin, and found that skin tone still seemed to make a difference in earnings.

That means that if two similar immigrants from Bangladesh, for example, came to the United States at the same time, with the same occupation and ability to speak English, the lighter-skinned immigrant would make more money on average.

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WASHINGTON (AP) ? New home sales fell in 2006 by the largest amount in 16 years, but they were up for a second straight month in December, raising hopes that the worst of the housing downturn is coming to an end.

The Commerce Department reported Friday that sales last month rose by 4.8 percent, following an even bigger 7.4 percent rise in November.

Those two increases, however, were not enough to salvage the entire year, with total sales of 1.06 million units, down 17.3 percent from 2005. That marked the biggest decline since a 17.8 percent plunge in the housing downturn of 1990.

In a separate report, the Commerce Department said that orders to U.S. factories for big-ticket manufactured goods rose in December by 3.1 percent, the largest gain in three months.

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TOKYO (AP) ? Toyota’s global production last year surged 10 percent to more than 9 million vehicles, narrowing the gap with General Motors, the world’s No. 1 automaker.

Toyota Motor Corp., riding on its reputation for fuel-efficient cars like the Prius hybrid, said Friday that it produced 9.018 million vehicles, including its Japanese subsidiaries that make trucks and smaller models. It was its fifth straight year of growth.

Detroit-based General Motors Corp. and its group automakers produced 9.18 million vehicles worldwide in 2006 ? about 162,000 vehicles more than its Japanese rival.

That gap has narrowed from about 819,000 vehicles at the end of 2005, when Toyota and its Japanese units made 8.232 million vehicles worldwide and GM’s production totaled 9.051 million.

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(AP) ??Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will pay more than $33 million in back wages to thousands of employees after turning itself in to the Labor Department for paying too little in overtime over the past five years, according to an agreement announced Thursday by the U.S. Labor Department.

Wal-Mart said the department’s review of its overtime calculations also found it had overpaid about 215,000 hourly workers during the same five-year period. The company said it will not seek to recover any overpayments, which were at least $20 per worker.