Language Skills and Earnings: Evidence from Childhood Immigrants*

Hoyt Bleakley and Aimee Chin

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2004, vol. 86, issue 2, 481-496

Abstract: Research on the effect of language skills on earnings is complicated by the endogeneity of language skills. This study exploits the phenomenon that younger children learn languages more easily than older children to construct an instrumental variable for language proficiency. We find a significant positive effect of English proficiency on wages among adults who immigrated to the United States as children. Much of this effect appears to be mediated through education. Differences between non-English-speaking origin countries and English-speaking ones that might make immigrants from the latter a poor control group for nonlanguage age-at-arrival effects do not appear to drive these findings. © 2004 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (485)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/003465304323031067 link to full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:tpr:restat:v:86:y:2004:i:2:p:481-496

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().