Linguistic Traits and Human Capital Formation

This research establishes empirically that existing cross-language variations in the structure of the future tense and the presence of grammatical gender affected human capital accumulation. Exploiting variations in the dominant languages among migrants from the same countries of origin, the study explores the impact of these traits on the educational attainment of second generation migrants in the US. The results suggest that college attendance among individuals with identical ancestry is (i) higher if the dominating language at home has a periphrastic future tense, and (ii) lower for women exposed predominantly to sex-based grammatical gender.