Language-Skill Complementarity: Returns to Immigrant Language Acquisition
By Eli Berman, Kevin Lang, Erez Siniver. 2003
216 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We examine the effect of language acquisition on the growth of immigrants' earnings. We gathered data on recent Soviet immigrants to Israel that include retrospective questions on earnings and language ability on entry into their current job. Language acquisition is found to interact positively with occupation level. Immigrant programmers and computer technicians have a return to tenure about three percentage points higher than that of natives; improved Hebrew language skills account for between 2/3 and 3/4 of that differential wage growth. In contrast, construction workers and gas station attendants have no convergence of wages to those of natives and language acquisition has no discernible effect on their wages. For these less skilled workers the estimated return' to Hebrew proficiency in the cross-section is entirely due to ability bias. This finding may invite a reinterpretation of other studies on the returns to language acquisition for low wage immigrants.
Subfields: Language and Linguistics, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/58d53497a0da4bb4df8887d70ab2b4a34138374f
How researchers see this paper
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In Language and Linguistics
In Sociology and Political Science
- Paul W. Miller
- Barry R. Chiswick
- Matti Sarvimäki
- Stephen Drinkwater
- Kari Hämäläinen
- Kenneth Clark
- Frank van Tubergen
- Christian Dustmann
Citations in the corpus
- Language Knowledge and Earnings in Catalonia (2012, unknown): “Berman et al. (2003) ruled out unobserved heterogeneity bias from the language augmented earning regression through differentiation with panel data.”
- International Migration and the Economics of Language (2014, background): “This suggests a complementarity between language and occupational skill in the generation of earnings (Chiswick and Miller, 2003) The findings of Chiswick and Repetto (2001) and Berman et al. (2003) therefore indicate an earnings gap of at least 20 percent between workers who are proficient in Hebre”
- Integrating Immigrants: The Impact of Restructuring Active Labor Market Programs (2016, background): “3 Studies documenting the association between language skills and labor market performance include Chiswick ð1991Þ, Dustmann ð1994Þ, Chiswick and Miller ð1995, 2007Þ, Dustmann and van Soest ð2001, 2002Þ, Berman, Lang, and Siniver ð2003Þ, Dustmann and Fabbri ð2003Þ, and Bleakley and Chin ð2004Þ.”
- The labour-market performance of recent migrants (2008, background): “For example, Dustmann and van Soest (2001) provide evidence for Germany and Berman et al. (2003) for Israel.”
- Language Usage, Participation, Employment and Earnings - Evidence for Foreigners in West Germany with Multiple Sources of Selection (2009, unknown): “For Israel Berman, Lang, and Siniver (2000) predict a 23 percent earnings’ increase for immigrants from the former Soviet Union who fluently speak Hebrew in 1994.”