This paper presents estimates of the impact of host language proficiency on the probability of immigrants having an employment.
The article uses data from the Spanish National Immigrant Survey and relies on two complementary econometric approaches, a
2SLS instrumental variable model and a bivariate probit model. Host language proficiency is instrumented using Bleakley and
Chin (Rev Econ Stat 86:481-496, 2004) strategy, which exploits the fact that younger children learn languages more easily
than older ones. Average treatment effects indicate that host language proficiency raises the probability of having a job
by about 15 and 22 percentage points among men and women, respectively. However, local effects can be more than twice as large.
Keywords:Immigration Host language proficiency Instrumental variables Biprobit
Forschungsbereich:Arbeitsmarktökonomie, Einkommen und soziale Sicherheit