This study quantifies the disadvantage in literacy skills that arises from the linguistic distance between their mother tongue and host country language, combining individual cross-country data on literacy scores with unique information on the linguistic distance between languages.

Unconditionally, pushed spin-offs are found to survive longer than their pulled counterparts. Using matched employer–employee data and novel multivariate decomposition techniques, we show that pushed spin-offs’ relative survival advantage is mostly explained by their larger human capital...