Language Barriers and Immigrant Health Production

Andrew Clarke () and Ingo Isphording

No 8846, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study the impact of language deficiency on the health production of childhood migrants to Australia. Our identification strategy relies on a quasi-experiment comparing immigrants arriving at different ages and from different linguistic origins by utilising a measure of differences along a continuous range of linguistic distances. Our main results indicate a large negative effect of English deficiency on physical health that is robust to a range of different specifications. In the presence of considerable non-classical measurement error in self-reported language proficiency, our results provide lower and upper bounds for the true effect of English deficiency on health of one half and a full standard deviation in the health score respectively. The empirical analysis is framed in terms of a Grossman model which indicates a twofold role of language skills in health production: language deficiency directly affects the efficiency of health production and indirectly affects access to health inputs. We provide some suggestive evidence on the relative importance of these distinct roles.

Keywords: language skills; international migration; health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 I12 J24 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2015-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-lab, nep-lma and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published - published in: Health Economics, 2017, 26 (6), 765 - 778

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