Anthropology to explain heterogeneity in language skills of immigrants. This measure is based on an automatical algorithm comparing … pronunciation and vocabulary of language pairs. Using data from the German Socio- Economic Panel covering the period from 1997 to … 2003, the linguistic distance measure is applied within a human capital framework of language acquisition. It is shown that …

economic transactions such as migration or international trade flows by imposing hurdles for second language acquisition and … its merits in two different applications. First, the effect of linguistic distance in the language acquisition of … of Spain. Across countries, linguistic distance is negatively correlated with reported language skills of immigrants …

successful migrants can alleviate some of the demographic burden associated with an aging population.We embed this discussion …

linguistic distance between mother tongue and host country language. Combining unique cross-country data on literacy scores with …

This study examines the returns to foreign and local language skills of immigrants in the Spanish labor market …. Different sources of endogeneity are addressed by deriving a set of novel instruments for language proficiency through a measure … to language skills are estimated separately for Spanish, English, German and French proficiency. Foreign language …

about these eff ects using individual and regional data for Australia. We employ an instrumental variables strategy to …

. It is shown that expected earnings, an idiosyncratic home bias, network ties to other migrants, strength of links to the … migration as well as the distribution of number of trips of migrants. It is shown how it can also be used for computational …