期刊名称：CORE Discussion Papers / Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (UCL), Louvain
出版年度：2007
卷号：1
出版社：Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (UCL), Louvain
摘要：Most papers on returns to languages are concerned with immigrants. We use
the European Community Household Panel Survey (ECHP) to infer returns on
non-native languages by non-immigrants in nine countries of the European
Union. We differ from the few other studies that deal with the same problem in
three respects. First, we correct for time-dependent measurement errors in selfreporting
as suggested by Dustmann and Van Soest and find that the resulting
IV estimates are much larger than those obtained by OLS. We also suggest that
there is little room for time-persistent errors and heterogeneity, and that
therefore our estimates should not suffer from the other usual biases. Secondly,
instead of using a dummy for each language, we use the ratio of the population
that is not proficient in a language in each country considered. Finally, we
estimate instrumental variable quantile regressions to illustrate how returns to
languages vary at different points of the distribution of earnings.
