The importance of foreign language skills in the labour markets of Central and Eastern Europe: assessment based on data from
online job portals
in: Martin Kahanec, Mikuláš Luptácik, Philipp Schmidt-Dengler, Economic Policy in a Dynamic Environment. Selected Papers of the 2016 Joint Annual Meeting of the Slovak Economic Association
and the Austrian Economic Association
This paper investigates the role of foreign language skills in the Visegrad Four countries' labour markets using data obtained
from key online vacancy boards in these countries and from an online wage survey. Firstly, it considers the demand for language
skills based on vacancies and then builds on this information by analysing the wage premium associated with foreign language
skills on the occupation and individual level. The results indicate that English language knowledge is highly in demand in
the Visegrad region, followed by the command of German language. Particularly, English proficiency appears to be correlated
with higher wages, when controlled for common wage determinants in a regression.
JEL-Codes:J2 C8
Keywords:Wage premium, Foreign language skills, Vacancy data, Web data
Forschungsbereich:Arbeitsmarktökonomie, Einkommen und soziale Sicherheit