We analyze the determinants of reading literacy, mathematical skills and science skills of young immigrant children in The Netherlands. We find that these are affected by age at immigration and whether or not one of the parents is native Dutch.

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...