Intergenerational Transmission of Language Capital and Economic Outcomes

Abstract

This paper investigates the intergenerational transmission of language capital in immigrant communities from one generation to the next, and the effect of language deficiencies on the economic performance of second generation immigrants. Our analysis is based on a long panel that oversamples immigrants and that allows their children to be followed even after they have left the parental home. Our results show a significant and sizeable association between parental language fluency and that of their children, conditional on a rich set of parental and family background characteristics. We also find that language deficiencies of the children of immigrants are associated with poorer labour market outcomes for females, but not for males. There is a strong relationship between parental language fluency and labour market outcomes for females, which works through the child's language proficiency.