The Wage Penalty of Regional Accents

Jeffrey Grogger, Andreas Steinmayr and Joachim Winter
Additional contact information
Jeffrey Grogger: University of Chicago
Joachim Winter: LMU Munich

No 184, Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series from CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition

Abstract: Previous work has documented that speaking one’s native language with an accent distinct from the mainstream is associated with lower wages. In this study, we seek to estimate the causal effect of speaking with a distinctive regional accent, disentangling the effect of the accent from that of omitted variables. We collected data on workers’ speech in Germany, a country with wide variation in regional dialects. We use a variety of strategies in estimation, including an instrumental variables strategy in which the instruments are based on research findings from the linguistics of accent acquisition. All of our estimators show that speaking with a distinctive regional accent reduces wages by an amount that is comparable to the gender wage gap. We also find that workers with distinctive regional accents tend to sort away from occupations that demand high levels of face-to-face contact, consistent with various occupational sorting models.

Keywords: accent; dialect; wage penalty; discrimination; SOEP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-09-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://rationality-and-competition.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/184.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Wage Penalty of Regional Accents (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rco:dpaper:184

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series from CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Viviana Lalli ().