Germany and Canada stand at polar ends of the scientific debate over language integration and ascension to citizenship. German naturalization, as of January 2000, contains an explicit language criterion for naturalization. The first German immigration act that will presumably come into effect on...

This paper is the first to estimate a causal effect of immigrant students' reading performance on their math performance. To overcome endogeneity issues due to unobserved ability, we apply an IV approach exploiting variation in age-at-arrival and the linguistic distance between origin and...

This paper uses the pooled data from the 2005-2009 American Community Survey to analyze the economic benefits of bilingualism to adult men born in the United States. Bilingualism among the native born is defined as speaking a language at home other than or in addition to English. Native born...

This paper analyzes the impact of missionary activity on English language proficiency and labor market earnings of all immigrants to the United States by using the pooled files of the American Community Survey (2005-09). We consider the colonial heritage of the origin country to determine if it...

This paper analyzes the Hebrew language proficiency, probability of employment, and labor market earnings of immigrants in Israel. It uses the 2010/11 Immigrant Absorption Survey conducted by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics. Unique features of the analysis include the study of...

This article summarizes three different strands of the literature that address the labor market effects of language-related human capital. (1) A general importance is demonstrated in the empirical evidence on earnings and employment effects of literacy as the ability to productively use written...

This article uses micro-data from the Spanish National Immigrant Survey to analyze the acquisition of Spanish language skills for immigrants in Spain. The motivation of the paper is threefold. Language skills are important for an individual's labour market performance, Spain offers an important...

This paper analyzes the interaction between migrant networks and linguistic distance in the location choice of migrants to the EU at the regional level. We test the hypothesis that networks and the ability to communicate in the host country language, proxied by linguistic distance, are...

This study examines the causal effects of Dutch language proficiency of immigrants from four main source countries on their labour market and social integration outcomes. Language proficiency appears ranked according to linguistic distance to The Netherlands, a ranking that even holds for the...