The Wage Premium from Foreign Language Skills

Jacek Liwiński

No 251, GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO)

Abstract: The globalization of labour markets makes language skills one of the key competences required by employers nowadays. Our purpose is to estimate the wage premium from foreign language skills (FLS) earned by the Poles. We also want to find out whether this premium is affected by the fact of working in Poland or abroad. The Poles seem to be a good case study, because the Polish language is not used for international communication, while as much as 58% of Poles command at least one foreign language and 5% of Poles earn their income abroad. We use data from three waves (2012-2014) of the Human Capital Balance survey with a pooled sample of about 35,000 individuals. We estimate wage equation with the Heckman correction for selection to employment and we check for robustness with propensity score matching. We find that the advanced command of a foreign language bring a 6% wage premium to individuals working in Poland and 22% to those working abroad. Interestingly, those working in Poland earn a much higher wage premium from proficiency in Spanish (29%), Italian (20%) or French (19%) than from proficiency in English (8%). But the English language is the only foreign language that brings a wage premium to Poles working abroad.

Keywords: foreign language skills; wage premium; wage equation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I26 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/182280/1/GLO-DP-0251.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The wage premium from foreign language skills (2019)
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:zbw:glodps:251

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().