Bilingual schooling and wage income: the case of Tatarstan in Russia

Abstract

ABSTRACT Tatarstan has been developing several public policies in favour of the Tatar language; probably the most relevant is bilingual schooling. Given this, the present research compares the monthly wage income between those who studied before, during, and after the implementation of this educational reform. Using data from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, this work estimates Mincer functions, adding dummy variables for bilingual schooling, and controlling for gender, marital status, ethnicity, and migration background. Moreover, the empirical strategy controls for endogeneity concerns and the autoregressive nature of earnings using dynamic panel data models. The main findings suggest that those who partially and fully studied in the bilingual school system obtain a higher income in comparison with those who fully studied in the monolingual school system. In other words, it seems that bilingualism is also increasing productivity and income levels of population. In this context, it is worth noticing that previous studies on educational outcomes found that bilingual students outperform monolinguals. Hence, further research should analyse other cases, excluding Russian and Tatar; other native languages are classified as endangered.