Returns to Foreign Language Skills of Immigrants in Spain

Abstract

Abstract. This study examines the returns to foreign language skills of immigrants in the Spanish labor market. Measurement error and endogeneity issues are addressed by deriving a set of novel instruments for foreign language proficiency through a measure of linguistic dissimilarity. Using crosssectional data from the 2007 National Immigrant Survey of Spain (NISS), returns to language skills are estimated separately for English, German, and French proficiency. Foreign language proficiency produces high returns, which appear to be mediated through the channel of occupational choice. The results are discussed against the background of a severe foreign language skills shortage in the Spanish economy. Immigrants may deal as a supplier of foreign language proficiency in the short run.

Immigrant Bilingualism in Spain: An Asset or a Liability?

“…It is tempting to propose that immigrant bilingualism will be particularly welcomed by Spanish society, where the low foreign language endowment of native Spaniards has been recognized as a barrier to their labor and social mobility within the European Union (Minder ). Yet, as Isphording () reports, even in Spain, not all foreign languages are rewarded equally, and wage premia extend primarily to foreign languages that are in high demand and low supply, such as English and French — languages that are rather uncommon among children of immigrants and in the ILSEG sample. The nature and extent of bilinguals’ labor market advantage may depend on the continued de‐ethnicization of sociolinguistic environment in Spain and on — highly unlikely (Pujolar and Gonzàlez ) — depoliticization of languages.…”

Foreign Languages and their Impact on Unemployment

“…My instrument was originally proposed by Isphording () in a different context and is a measure of the linguistic distance between the respondent's mother tongue and the foreign language in question. The intuition is that individuals are, ceteris paribus, less likely to learn foreign languages that are very different or very distant to their mother tongue.…”

“…However, accounting for all these dimensions in one single measure has been a difficult challenge for linguists. Following Isphording's () approach, I therefore employ a measure from the Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) that compares lists of words across languages based only on their vocabulary and pronunciation . Although simple, this measure has been used by experts to classify languages and to construct language family trees.…”

Your Language or Mine?

“…Under the validity of the identifying assumption, the 2SLS estimation of Equations (3) and (4) should provide the causal e¤ect of oral ‡uency in Catalan on each of the outcomes ( IV ) among native Spanish speakers who improved their language pro…ciency in the UK and the US, respectively, and by Isphording (2013) to estimate the return to foreign language skills in Spain.…”