This paper investigates the intergenerational effect of communication barriers on child health at birth using a natural experiment in Switzerland. We leverage the fact that refugees arriving in Switzerland originate from places that have large shares of French (or Italian) speakers for...

This study establishes the influence of sex-based grammatical gender on gendered violence. We demonstrate a statistically significant relationship between gendered language and the incidence of intimate partner violence in a cross-section of countries. Motivated by this evidence, we conduct an...

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...

This paper identifies a new source of differences in religiosity: the presence of future tense marking in language. We argue that the rewards and punishments that incentivise religious behaviour are less effective for speakers of languages that contain future tense marking. Consistent with this...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore how potential exposure to missionary activity impacts both English language proficiency and labor market earnings of male and female immigrants to the United States. Design/Methodology/Approach: This study uses the pooled files of the American...

In a world increasingly globalized, multiple language skills can create more employment opportunities. Several countries include language training programs in active labor market programs for the unemployed. We analyze the effects of a language training program on the re-employment probability...

We examine the heterogeneous impacts of foreign language use at work on earnings of both native-born workers and foreign-born workers, using a longitudinal survey, viz. the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) running from 1994 to 2001. Our findings are the following. First, for native-born...

The globalization of labour markets makes language skills one of the key competences required by employers nowadays. Our purpose is to estimate the wage premium from foreign language skills (FLS) earned by the Poles. We also want to find out whether this premium is affected by the fact of...

We examine the ability of immigrants to transfer the occupational human capital they acquired prior to immigration. We first augment a model of occupational choice to study the implications of language proficiency on the cross-border transferability of occupational human capital. We then explore...