Language Knowledge and Earnings in Catalonia

Abstract

This paper represents the first contribution that investigates the economic value of Catalan knowledge in terms of earnings, focusing on national and foreign first-and second-generation immigrants in Catalonia. Specifically, drawing on data from the "Survey on Living Conditions and Habits of the Catalan Population (2006)", we want to quantify the expected earnings differential between individuals who are proficient in Catalan and those who are not, taking into account the potential endogeneity between knowledge of Catalan and earnings. The results indicate the existence of a positive return to knowledge of Catalan, with a 7.5% increase in earnings estimated by OLS; however, when we account for the presence of endogeneity, monthly earnings are around 18% higher for individuals who are able to speak and write Catalan. However, we also find that language and education are complementary inputs for generating earnings in Catalonia, given that knowledge of Catalan increases monthly earnings only for more educated individuals.

Daily dialect-speaking and wages among native Dutch speakers

“…Our main finding of a wage penalty for dialect speaking is seemingly at odds with existing literature on the effect of being bilingual which suggests that there is a wage premium for being proficient in a second language (Christofides and Swidinsky 2010;Di Paolo and Raymond 2012;Chen et al 2014;Cappellari and Di Paolo 2018). However, there is a clear distinction between speaking an additional language and speaking a dialect.…”

“…Previous studies have focused on the effect of language proficiency on earnings of male immigrants. Recent examples are Bleakley and Chin (2004), Miranda and Zhu (2013a, b), Di Paolo and Raymond (2012) and Yao and van Ours (2015). However, it is not only language proficiency that affects labor market performance.…”

Children of immigrants and social mobility in officially bilingual societies

“…In Catalonia, some economists have recently shown that, ceteris paribus, those who are fluent in Catalan find jobs more easily, obtain promotions more quickly and earn more than those who are not fluent in Catalan (Rendon 2007;Di Paolo and Raymond 2010).…”

Irrigation as an adaptive strategy to climate change: an economic perspective on Brazilian agriculture

“…8 To verify the admissibility of these instruments, we perform a test for overidentification (Hansen's J test) based on the two-stage least squares (TSLS) estimator. According to Di Paolo and Raymond (2012) and Cameron and Trivedi (2010), the endogenous switching model and the TSLS estimator are similar methods for addressing an endogenous dummy variable (irrigation, in our case). Thus, we used TSLS to understand whether the chosen instruments are valid.…”