Language Proficiency and Labour Market Performance of Immigrants in the UK

Christian Dustmann and Francesca Fabbri

No 156, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Abstract: This paper uses two recent UK surveys to investigate labour market performance, the determi-nants of language proficiency, and the effect of language on earnings and employment prob-abilities of non-white immigrants. Our results show that language acquisition, employment prob-abilities, as well as earnings differ widely across non-white immigrants, according to their ethnic origin. Language has a strong and positive effects on employment probabilities. Furthermore, lack of English fluency leads to substantial earnings losses of immigrants. While earnings of white and ethnic minority natives develop in a similar manner, there is a large earnings gap be-tween these two groups, and ethnic minority immigrants. English fluency contributes considera-bly to reducing these differences. Addressing the problems of measurement error and unob-served heterogeneity in language variables, our results indicate that measurement error in the language variable leads to underestimation of the importance of language for employment prob-abilities and earnings in straightforward regressions. In comparison with results found for other countries, language proficiency seems to be more important for labour market outcomes of UK immigrants.

Keywords: Economics of minorities; human capital formation; immigrant workers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 J24 J61 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-05
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://repec.iza.org/RePEc/Discussionpaper/dp156.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Language Proficiency and Labour Market Performance of Immigrants in the UK (2000)
Journal Article: Language proficiency and labour market performance of immigrants in the UK (2003)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp156

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Address: IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Mark Fallak ().