The English language fluency and occupational success of ethnic minority immigrant men living in English metropolitan areas

By Michael A. Shields, S. Wheatley Price. 2002

220 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract. This paper examines two crucial aspects of the assimilation experience of ethnic minority immigrants in the United Kingdom. It explores the determinants of their English language (speaking) fluency and the key role such skills play in their occupational success. Our sample is derived from the Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities undertaken in 1994. Uniquely this data contains an interviewer-assessed measure of English language fluency. Importantly, we also attempt to control for possible endogeneity bias in the estimates of the effect of language fluency on occupational success. We find that fluency is associated with significantly higher mean hourly occupational wages.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/43d8e4c04eedca90a700e4678d89718a6e179152

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In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Language Usage, Participation, Employment and Earnings - Evidence for Foreigners in West Germany with Multiple Sources of Selection (2009, unknown): “1 Further studies establishing positive eects, amongst others, are Grenier (1984), Kossoudji (1988), Rivera-Batiz (1990), Chiswick (1991), Chiswick and Miller (1999), Dustmann (1999), Dustmann and van Soest (2001), Dustmann and van Soest (2002), Shields and Price (2002) , Berman, Lang, and Siniver ”
Social Contacts and the Economic Performance of Immigrants: A Panel Study of Immigrants in Germany 1 (2012, background): “First, in the literature, occupation is typically viewed as an aggregated variant of the income variable, and so using it as an independent variable in the income equation is considered illegitimate (Mincer, 1979 as cited in Sloane, 1985:125).”
Overeducation and Ethnic Minorities in Britain (2002, unknown): “highest qualification. Shields and Wheatley Price (2002) , using the same dataset, take the UK”
Spoken fluency revisited (2010, background): “Few other items of the terminology of linguists are so easily used in everyday parlance and the metaphor upon which the terms fluent and fluency are based (that of flow, like a river) is a relatively straightforward and easily comprehensible one.”