Other variables the same, overall bilinguals earn 4.7% less than monolingual English speakers, but the earnings differential varies sharply by the language spoken. Most of the native-born bilinguals report speaking English “very well” (85%), with most of the others speaking it “well” (10%). Native born bilingualism is rare only 6.5% report a non-English language, and of those 71% report Spanish. Bilingualism among the native born is defined as speaking a language at home other than or in addition to English. This paper uses the pooled data from 2005 to 2009 American Community Survey to analyze the economic benefits associated with bilingualism for adult men born in the United States. For elementary occupations the estimate appears to be insignificant which proves that return to foreign language skills exists only for a limited number of specific jobs. The highest return to foreign language skills is obtained by managers and results to be 13%. However, there is considerable heterogeneity in the economic returns across age groups, levels of education, and occupations. Moreover, wage premium for advanced level of knowledge reaches 24%. The results indicate positive wage premium for foreign language skills in Russia which approximately equals to 9% when controlling for job-related characteristics. This research explores the returns to different levels of foreign language skills in the Russian labor market and tries do disentangle the differences in return associated with job characteristics. Though foreign language is widely accepted as an important form of human capital and a factor of economic growth, the labor market outcomes for foreign language skills in developing economies remain understudied. This evidence requires further political attention, given its implications for large number of workers, especially in feminised, low-status service jobs. Results show that while ‘hard’ verbal-reasoning skills are associated with high average salaries, as is predicted by neoclassical theory, the potentially undervalued linguistic skills – interactive and multilingual skills – are unrewarded and even penalised. We analyse the demand and reward for linguistic skills through a two-step analysis of occupational and individual data derived from two sources: the Occupational Information Network and the Current Population Survey. While human capital theory predicts an increase in wages as the demand for linguistic skills rises, from cultural/institutional perspectives, it can be theorised that communicative abilities and foreign-language knowledge are socially undervalued because of their association with feminised activities, ethnicity, and low-status service jobs. Using US data, this article analyses the demand for and payment of linguistic competency, a cross-cutting kind of skill that is basic for both cognitive and social work in the new economy and is one of the human capacities that is most difficult to automate. However, such broad skill categories involve numerous essential competencies that can be differentially rewarded or go simply unrewarded. Skills that are difficult to automate are expected to increase in demand and reward according to skill-biased technological change advocates, who have identified high rewards for cognitive and social skills. As education policy is the main determinant of English language acquisition (not only in Germany), this information is highly relevant for policy-makers. Finally, by examining language skills instead of the use of such skills in the workplace, we identify individual returns to foreign languages for the general population. We also show that wage differentials cannot be explained by the value of foreign language skills as a general ability signal, but they are driven by the productive value of foreign language skills. Any remaining sources of endogeneity in the level of language proficiency are addressed by an instrumental variable approach that exploits exogenous variation in individuals’ exposure to foreign language acquisition in school. We address endogeneity issues by using novel data that combine comprehensive information about individuals’ characteristics with fine-grained self-assessments of language skills based on indicators of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). Incremental improvements in the level of skills, e.g., from basic to independent user, increase wages by 11 percent, on average. Using the 20 sample of the German Socio-Economic Panel’s Innovation Sample (GSOEP-IS), we find that native speakers of German with English language skills earn a wage premium of 13 percent, on average. This article explores the relationship between foreign language skills and individuals’ labor income in Germany, focusing on the English language.
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