This paper investigates the economic returns to language skills and bilingualism. The analysis is staged in Kazakhstan, a multi-ethnic country with complex ethnic settlement patterns that has switched its official state language from Russian to Kazakh. Using two newly assembled data sets, we...

This paper investigates the economic returns to language skills and bilingualism. The analysis is staged in Kazakhstan, a multi-ethnic country with complex ethnic settlement patterns that has switched its official state language from Russian to Kazakh. Using two newly assembled data sets, we...

We consider a labour market where two languages are commonly in use and each individual may make a costly investment to learn the language which is not his or her mother tongue. Language skills are productive in a human capital sense and can also be used to signal unobservable traits to...

This paper takes advantage of a recent policy experiment in Ukraine's secondary education system to study the effect of stricter requirements for proficiency in the state language on linguistic minority students' demand for, as well as opportunities to pursue, further studies at the university...

We model political contestation over school language policy, within linguistic communities where weak property rights protection leads to high decentralized expropriation. We show that improvements in governance institutions that facilitate property rights protection might exacerbate such...

The essay gives an overview of how language planning and language policy can be motivated and analyzed by economic methods. It is discussed what type of value language-related goods possess and what type of goods they are. Properties like degrees of rivalry, exclusion, and shielding and how they...

In this paper I would like to elaborate on the interaction between law and language. The use of the different (legal) languages of the European Union Member States is one of the most practical and most difficult problems in the process of European integration. The linguistic matters are directly...

Language planning refers to a kind of humanly-conscious intervention within certain limits in the process of language selection. It has not only something to do with the language itself, but is far more involved in such issues as the adjustments of the relations among people or between people...

This paper conducts a multi-value Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) of the formal adoption and sustainability of minority protection rules in four new EU member states (Poland, Romania, Estonia, Latvia) over a twelve-year period including pre- and post-accession phases (1997-2008) and five...

The territory of the European Union is made up of a rich and wide-ranging universe of languages, which is not only circumscribed to the "state languages". The existence of multilingualism is one of Europe’s defining characteristic and it should remain so in the constantly evolving model of...