Languages use different systems for classifying nouns. Gender languages assign nouns to distinct sex-based categories, masculine and feminine. We construct a new data set, documenting the presence or absence of grammatical gender in more than 4,000 languages which together account for more than...

This research establishes the influence of linguistic traits on human behavior. Exploiting variations in the languages spoken by children of migrants with identical ancestral countries of origin, the analysis indicates that the presence of periphrastic future tense, and its association with...

We investigate the pattern of intergenerational transmission of language in a bilingual society. We consider the case of Catalonia, where the two main speech communities, Spanish and Catalan, are of similar sizes, both languages are official, and each one enjoys the protection of a different...

There are various degrees of similarity between the languages of different immigrants and the language of their destination country. This linguistic distance is an obstacle to the acquisition of a language, which leads to large differences in the attainments of the language skills necessary for...

This research explores the economic causes and consequences of language structures. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that variations in pre-industrial geographical characteristics that were conducive to higher return to agricultural investment, larger gender gap in...

The implications of human capital portability – including interactions between education, language skills and pre- and post-immigration occupational matching – for earnings are explored for new immigrants to Canada. Given the importance of occupation-specific skills, as a precursor we also...

A number of studies have shown that childhood speech impairments such as stuttering are associated with lower test scores and educational attainment. However, it is unclear whether this result is causal in nature or whether it can be explained by difficult-to-measure heterogeneity at the...

This article uses micro-data from the Spanish National Immigrant Survey to investigate the impact of Spanish language proficiency on immigrants' earnings. The results, based on Instrumental Variables (IV), point to a substantial earnings return to Spanish proficiency, of approximately 27%. This...

Texas requires a school district to offer bilingual education when its enrollment of limited English proficient (LEP) students in a particular elementary grade and language is twenty or higher. Using school panel data, we find a significant increase in the probability that a district offers...

We empirically analyze the language proficiency of migrants in the Netherlands. Traditionally, the emphasis in studying language proficiency and economic outcomes has been on the relation between earnings and indicators for language proficiency, motivated by the human capital theory. Here we...